The school of art and life
Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-haines created a fabled haven for painters in wartime Suffolk. Laura Gascoigne explores the legend of Benton End
ONE late-july morning in 1939, a group of art students and their teacher could be seen out painting in the Essex village of Dedham. They were not recording the picturesque charms of Constable country, however; they were painting the smoking ruins of their former art school.
Opened only two years earlier, the school was the brainchild of a couple of unconventional artists, Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-haines, neither of whom had been through the art-school system. A well-born Welshman from the Swansea suburb of Sketty, Morris had dropped out of the Royal College of Music to become an artist; a middle-class Londoner from Maida Vale, Lett-haines had joined the army before serving in the First World War. The two met on Armistice Day 1918, at a party thrown by Lett-haines and his American wife, and struck up what would become a lifelong partnership. When LettHaines’s wife left for America in 1919, he followed Morris to Cornwall and then to Paris in pursuit of a shared artistic dream.
Everyone would muck in: “We do not believe there are artists and students, there are degrees of proficiency”
In the mid 1920s, the pair were a fixture on the London bohemian art scene, Morris known for his post-impressionist paintings of flowers and birds and Lett-haines for his early experiments in English Surrealism. Yet, despite some early successes, with the 1930s trend towards abstraction, their figurative style fell out of fashion. Nothing daunted, the artists decided to start an art school modelled on the informal French académies they had attended in Paris. The idea, as expounded in their prospectus, was for ‘students to work together with more experienced artists to produce sincere paintings’. Everyone would muck in: ‘We do not believe there are artists and students, there are degrees of proficiency.’
Since the late 1920s, they had rented an old Suffolk farmhouse called The Pound in Higham, with a large garden where Morris indulged his growing passion for breeding irises. Artist friends such as Frances Hodgkins would regularly come and paint there— Hodgkins’s painting Man with Macaw (1930) captured Morris with his famously foulmouthed parrot, Rubeo—and art students seemed a logical extension. The surroundings were ideal, but, as the house was too small to accommodate a school, suitable premises were found in Dedham, opposite the Marlborough pub.
In April 1937, the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing opened for business. The first two applicants were a lad from Colchester and an 80-year-old lady described as ‘very washed out’ by Lett-haines, but numbers soon picked up: 60 pupils would join over the next six months. Early arrivals included Kathleen Hale, later famous for her
‘Orlando’ books—one of which would feature Morris as a dance master and Lett-haines as a ‘Katnapper’—and David Carr, a member of the biscuit family whose father had cut him off for dropping out of Oxford, but whose mother stepped in to pay the fees.
In 1939 came the 17-year-old Lucian Freud, who had achieved the dual distinction of being expelled from both Dartington and Bryanston—the latter for letting a pack of foxhounds loose in the school buildings. Freud fell completely under Morris’s spell and flourished under his liberal teaching regime. He was thrilled with a portrait Morris painted of him, writing home to his parents in Moles-worthian epistolary style: ‘It is exactly like my face, is green it is a marvellous picture.’ The portrait, now with Tate, was painted in 1941, two years after the school fire that had allegedly been caused by lighted cigarette stubs carelessly dropped by Freud and Carr. With typical generosity—and with the case unproven—the two suspects were allowed to stay on when the school relocated to Benton End, a rambling 17th-century house with another large garden on the outskirts of Hadleigh.
The school, the garden and the legendary way of life that Morris and Lett-haines established at Benton End are currently the subjects of a celebratory exhibition at Firstsite, Colchester, Essex. The atmosphere of artistic freedom the couple fostered in this corner of Suffolk was a breath of fresh air at a time when, even for artists, there were stiflingly ‘proper’ ways to paint. At Benton End, propriety went out of the window. Students whose wings might have been clipped at traditional art schools took flight.
For Glyn Morgan, a young Welsh artist invited to the school after Morris spotted his work in a Pontypridd exhibition, ‘Benton End was a world apart’ infused with Morris’s ‘freedom of spirit’; he later found the atmosphere at Camberwell stuffy by comparison. Maggi Hambling, the daughter of a local bank manager, joined the school at the age of 15, in 1960, attending in the school holidays and helping out in the kitchen—thus earning herself the nickname Maggi Soop. She would later move on to Camberwell and the Slade, yet
‘nowhere ever matched the cut-and-thrust of Benton End. It prepared me for the world and I found out who I was. My mother once said, “I wish to goodness you had never set foot in that place” but it was too late’.
An added bonus for students was Morris’s garden, where they set up their easels amid the flowerbeds, creating what the young Ronald Blythe remembered as ‘a heady and irresistible mix of paint and pollen’. Every winter, Morris would take off on plant-collecting and painting trips to southern Europe and North Africa; alongside the irises and poppies he cultivated, the garden was full of horticultural rarities. After an article about the place appeared in Gardens Illustrated in 1946, plantsmen and women started to beat a path to Morris’s door. Vita Sackville-west became a regular visitor. Beth Chatto’s first impression of the garden in the mid 1950s was of ‘a bewildering, mind-stretching, eye-widening canvas of colours, textures and shapes,
created primarily with bulbous and herbaceous plants. Later I came to realise that it was possibly the finest collection of such plants in the country’. Morris went on to win a succession of awards.
Rivalling the glories of Morris’s garden were the delights of Lett-haines’s kitchen, which, at its height, dished up 400 meals a week. ‘You didn’t pay much considering you had two enormous meals with wine—they couldn’t have made much profit,’ reckoned Morgan. At three guineas a week for tuition and board, they didn’t. Morris’s inheritance of the family baronetcy in 1947 looked good on the school notepaper, but it did not materially improve its finances.
As time went on, the school was inevitably wound down and the garden became too big for Morris to handle. The memory of Benton End seemed destined to be lost, until the Pinchbeck Charitable Trust recently acquired the property with a view to re-opening it as a museum—and clearance of the overgrown garden revealed many of Morris’s bulbs still flowering beneath the brambles.
‘Life with Art: Benton End and the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing’ is at Firstsite, Colchester, Essex, until April 18 (01206 713700; www.firstsite.uk)