This highly distinctive portrait is of the young painter Glyn Morgan (1926-2015), a student of Cedric Morris who would have been in his mid-twenties at the time of sitting.

Aged sixteen, Morgan enrolled at Cardiff College of Art where he was taught by Ceri Richards. Richards introduced Morgan to modern painters such as Picasso and Augustus John and it was in the Cardiff Museum that Morgan first came across a painting by Cedric Morris. A year later, Morgan entered two pictures into an art competition in his home town of Pontypridd, twelve miles inland from Cardiff. The exhibition was organised by Esther Grainger, who invited Cedric Morris (himself born in Sketty, Swansea) to be the judge. Morris thought Morgan’s work showed promise and suggested he come to his private art school in Suffolk. In the summer of 1944, after leaving Cardiff College of Art, Morgan arranged a week-long visit to Benton End, the home of Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines from which they ran the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting.

Like many young artists who went there, Morgan regarded his first stay at Benton End as a ‘life changing’ experience, returning whenever he could, right up until Morris died in 1982. Morgan was instrumental in organising the 1985 exhibition The Benton End Circle at Bury St Edmunds Gallery; in 1994 he exhibited alongside Morris in the two-man show Master and Pupil at the Chappel Galleries, Colchester and he contributed the first chapter of the book Benton End Remembered. Morgan’s own painting of Morris, Cedric Morris in his Garden, painted in the late 1950s, is now in the collection of the Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service.

Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines established their art school at Pound Farm, Dedham, Essex in 1937 and by the end of the first year it had attracted around sixty students. In 1940 they were forced to move to a ramshackle Tudor house in Hadleigh, Suffolk after their first house burnt down in an accidental fire, most likely caused by teenage smokers Lucian Freud and David Carr. The unique atmosphere of Benton End has been well documented by its former attendees. Both Morris and Lett-Haines would discuss painting with their students, but neither was didactic, requiring that ‘each student’s way of working be sincere to their own vision’. Lett-Haines virtually gave up painting to concentrate on running the house and cooking meals for everyone, while Morris was in charge of the gardens - he was a renowned plantsman and breeder of irises - when not painting with a rabbit or parrot on his shoulder. Within the walled gardens a changing cast of eccentric characters came and went, sharing meals and exchanging ideas, all the while offering Morris a steady supply of subjects for portraits.

David and Barbara Carr were also students of Morris. Their 1940 portrait shows the couple, who were not yet married, as two highly independent characters, conjoined by their lovingly described, hand-knitted sweaters. Perhaps two of Morris’s most well-known students are Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling. Freud’s early career now acknowledged to be highly indebted to Morris, Hambling’s more so to Lett-Haines. Freud’s early figure paintings share with Morris the same sense of intense observation, a characteristic exaggeration of his subjects’ mouth and eyes and a relish for patterned clothing and textural detail. The portrait Freud painted of Morris in 1940 is now in the collection of the National Museum of Wales and Morris’s portrait of the nineteen year old Freud, from same year, is owned by the Tate Gallery. Freud’s method of working across his paintings also came from Morris. The sitter Glyn Morgan describes Morris’s assured technique:

‘Cedric...would start at the top of the canvas and work his way in rows to the bottom, rather like knitting a pullover. His mastery of the medium was such that when he reached the bottom of the picture it never needed any alteration or adjustment’.

In 1938 Morris presented one hundred portraits, necessitating they be hung three deep, at the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery, London. Peggy Guggenheim was the reluctant host, having hoped to show ‘the beautiful flower pictures for which he is famous’, rather than the portraits she considered to be ‘in most cases nearly caricatures, all of them on the unpleasant side’.

Art historian Ben Tufnell refutes his dealer’s scepticism, pointing out that Morris mostly painted the people that he was close to - his lover, friends, students and patrons. Further, in an article penned for the Sunday Times on 27 March 1938, Eric Newton more positively noted that ‘Morris merely states the facts that interest him…’, his work, ‘…a welcome relief from the flatteries and evasions of ordinary portrait exhibitions’.

Tufnell points out that Morris’s psychologically inflected approach to portraiture was not typical of the English tradition and that his work had more in common with continental and particularly French painting – Morris had, after all, studied at the Academie Delacluse, Paris in 1914. Morris drew inspiration from the work of Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Gauguin, and the Post Impressionists, Renaissance masters such as Giotto and Piero della Francesca and, from England, Walter Sickert. The high key colours in Morris’s portrait of poet and novelist Mary Butts, and their pivotal role in the painting’s formal design, find historical precedent in Van Gogh’s portraits of local characters, such as his gloriously decorative portrait of postman Joseph Roulin.

Despite enjoying early critical success and close friendships with many of the leading modernists of the day - Christopher Wood travelled to Tréboul after seeing Morris’s 1927 painting Corner in Tréboul; Barbara Hepworth sat for her portrait in 1931 - Morris’s partial retreat to rural Suffolk set him apart from the London art scene and as such his post-war work was not as widely appreciated as it might have been. Much closer attention is now being paid to Morris’s portraits, which until quite recently have been overshadowed by his more commercially successful still lifes. This portrait of Glyn Morgan is a superlative example of its kind. The bold features of the sitter - his animated hair and typically direct stare - give a powerful sense of the sitter’s personality, while the narrow range of colours – the intense green of his shirt, jauntily picked out yellow cravat and warm grey background - structure the composition. It is a notably affectionate rendition of Morgan, whose likeness here bears more than a passing resemblance to a young Lett-Haines.

1 For more about his life and career, see Morgan’s Telegraph obituary: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11790163/Glyn-Morgan-artist-obituary.html
2 see for example, Benton End Remembered; Cedric Morris Lett Haines and The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, Unicorn Press, London, 2002
3 Ibid, p5, introduction by Richard Morphet
4 Ibid p18, Glyn Morgan
5 Ben Tufnell, Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, Teaching Art and Life, Norfolk Museums Service / National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 2002, p23
6 Ibid