In 1927, Cedric Morris and his partner Lett Haines moved to London, having spent much of early 1920s in Paris. As such, Matinée des Canards will have been painted at their new home and studio at 32 Great Ormond Street, Bloomsbury. By this point, Morris’ career was in the ascendancy and he soon found himself invited to participate in many of the most influential group exhibitions of the period.
Bird paintings are one of the most important subjects in Morris’ oeuvre. He completed over 50 oils of birds over the course of his career, more than 30 of which were painted in the 1920s. In the early 1920s, Morris’ fascination with this subject was enriched by his friendship with ornithologist and plantsman Collingwood Ingram, who he joined on numerous plant-finding excursions to Europe. On one particular trip to Gibraltar, they secured a rare Bonelli’s eagle for London Zoo, to whom Morris paid regular visits. Guests at 32 Great Ormond Street remember it being filled with plants, animals and birds. After the couple moved to Pound Farm in Dedham, Essex, in 1930, their menagerie grew to include Ptolemy the peacock, Cockey the yellow-crested cockatoo and Rubio the scarlet macaw. In addition to tree frogs, dogs and cats, they kept mallard and muscovy ducks and parakeets which flew freely around the garden.
Just as he would assemble flowers for a painting, in Matinée des Canards, Morris presents five different breeds of duck. The birds flying in the distance are commonly-seen mallards, three male and one female, while the diving bird is a distinctive, now rare to Britain, male pintail. To the left, in the foreground, is a male shoveler and to the right, a female shelduck, behind which stands a handsome male eider.
Across the decades, Morris’ bird paintings take various forms. The 1920s pictures are often detailed portraits of one or two birds, usually large birds, such as sea birds and birds of prey. Their backgrounds are typically dramatic, but simplified and largely invented – as we see in the present work, Greenland Falcon, 1928, and later pictures such as the Tate’s Peregrine Falcons, 1942. Here, Morris is primarily concerned with capturing the intrinsic animal presence of the ducks, rather than with achieving an accurate likeness – they are expressive and yet highly individualised portraits. In a 1936 interview, he explained how his intention in such pictures was ‘to provoke a lively sympathy with the mood of the birds which ornithological exactitude may tend to destroy.’1

1 The artist cited in Cedric Morris, Tate Gallery, London, 1984, exh cat, p86