Cedric Morris was born in Sketty, Swansea on the 11th of December, 1889, to a Welsh industrialist father, George Lockwood Morris, and Wilhelmina Cory. After spending some of his youth working in Ontario and New York, Cedric returned to South Wales and eventually started painting and studied in Montparnasse, Paris, until the First World War.
After he was discharged in 1917, Cedric went to Cornwall and studied plants, where he was friends with painter Frances Hodgkins. At the end of the war, Cedric met Arthur Lett-Haines in London, where they fell in love and became lifelong partners. They planned to move to America together with Arthur’s then wife, Gertrude Aimee Lincoln, who then left for America on her own. They lived together in Newlyn, in Cornwall, in Paris and London, where Cedric continued his painting with success.
In the 1930s, they moved to ‘a pink-coloured house’ in Higham, Suffolk and started the East Anglian School of Painting in 1937. Students of Cedric’s included Vivien Gruble, Lucian Freud, Maggi Hambling and Joan Warburton.
Though Cedric had relationships with John Aldrigde and Paul Odo, and Arthur had his own affairs, they spent their lives together, until Cedric’s death on the 8th of February, 1982. Arthur died in 1984 and they are both buried at Friars Road Cemetery, Hadleigh - Cedric’s gravestone was made in Welsh slate.
Images: Self Portrait by Cedric Morris (c. 1930), via NPG; Cedric Morris by Frances Hodgkins; Self Portrai (1919), at National Museum Wales; Portrait of Arthur Lett-Haines by Cedric Morris (1925).
