Footnotes

Provenance
Sir Peter Wakefield & Miss Mary Rose Wakefield
With Austin Desmond Fine Art, London, where purchased by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Tate Gallery, Cedric Morris, 28 March-13 May 1984, cat.no.89 (as Flowers in a Brown Jug)

Literature
Richard Morphet, Cedric Morris, Tate Gallery, London, 1984, p.117, cat.no.89 (col.ill, back cover)

'I like to think that behind this special painting [flower painting] an esoteric line of thought that expresses itself in symbols portraying the eternity of experience that flowers themselves have' ('Concerning Flower Painting', The Studio, May 1942, pp.121-132).

Although a frequent traveller, Cedric Morris spent much of the early 1920s based in Paris and the latter part of the decade working in a studio at 32 Great Ormond Street, London. During these years, the self-taught Morris developed complex surrealist, abstract and portrait practices. He engaged with leading art and society figures of the day, developing friendships as broad as Nancy Cunard and Peggy Guggenheim, Winifred and Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood and John Banting. He staged his first one-man exhibition in Rome in 1922 and was represented in the British Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1928 (and again in 1932). He exhibited as part of the Seven & Five Society and had one man shows with Arthur Tooth and in The Hague.

Following a decade of city life, in 1929 Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines took a lease on Pound Farm in Suffolk. The move to the country was to be permanent, the couple moving to nearby Benton End a few years later and there establishing The East Anglian School of Painting (famously tutoring Lucian Freud). The gabled and buttressed Benton End dates to the sixteenth century and with its extensive walled gardens provided a perfect habitat for the proliferation of flowers and vegetables. It was here that Morris was able to fully indulge his passion, becoming a plantsman rather than a gardener and demonstrating his tremendous skill by rearing varieties that would not ordinarily be found in this country. Of particular note were his irises, for which he won the Foster Memorial Plaque, the highest award made by the British Iris Society, in 1949. Other favourites were the roses, sweet peas and lilies that lined the garden beds. Green Mountain Lilies (1950) celebrates a selection of these flowers and the diversity of colour that was achieved in the garden by Morris and his botanist associate Nigel Scott during the 1950s. The years in which Scott worked alongside Morris at Benton End have been described as 'the most perfect period of the garden'. The present work, impressive in scale, was included in and illustrated as the back cover of the Tate Gallery's 1984 exhibition catalogue on Cedric Morris.