Spring flowers

A self-taught painter and keen horticulturist, Cedric Morris was born in Wales and studied briefly in Paris. With his partner, the painter and sculptor Arthur Lett-Haines (1894-1978), he was a member of the art communities of Newlyn in Cornwall (1919-20), Paris (1921-6) and London (1926-39). Between 1937 and c.1975, Morris co-founded with Lett-Haines, the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing - an influential, non-academic art school for non-professionals and professionals alike. In 1940 the school was moved to Morris and Lett-Haines's home at Benton End.

Spring flowers is an early work by Morris from 1923, and shows both his vibrant use of colour and his richly-textured painted surfaces. Morris did not use underdrawing but painted straight onto the canvas, apparently having a complete vision of a painting in his head before he began filling every inch of surface.

The subject of the painting can most accurately be described as a garden landscape. Morris made several of these unusual compositions 1923-1925 in which a section of garden of mixed flowers is presented in close-up focus and covers the entire canvas, the subject seeming to continue beyond the borders. This all-over quality has the effect of emphasising the surface pattern while the juxtaposition of strong and pale colours creates an ambiguous depth. This tension between surface and depth was a quality which Morris admired in the work of Frances Hodgkins when he leased her Kensington studio in 1919 and which seems to have influenced his early work. He spoke of the walls of her studio being 'lined with…compositions in which textural effects were juxtaposed with an emphasis on pattern. They contained that all-over quality [in] which…Roger Fry was so much interested (I often wished later that his attention could have been drawn to her work)'.