Virginian partridges

A self-trained artist, Cedric Morris absorbed influences from a wide variety of artists and sources, living in artistic communities in Cornwall and Paris in the 1920s. Widely travelled, his two passions aside from art were ornithology and horticulture. Both are represented in Virginian partridges, 1929, with its depiction of American birds set amidst a sea of cacti. ‘He loves wild birds and flowers and landscape’, the art critic for The Scotsman wrote in 1932,

and these he paints with deep poetical feeling in patterns remarkable for their breadth and frankness, and heavily loaded with pigment. Had he early endured the discipline of a school of art he would perhaps have been today a much more accurate draughtsman; but it is inconceivable that the freshness of his outlook, the carless felicity of his pattern, and the force of his purely instinctive sense of style could have emerged. His mere use of paint is ravishing.¹‘Cedric Morris. A painter to rejoice in. R. B. A. exhibition. By our London art critic’, The Scotsman, 11 Apr. 1932, p. 13.

Cedric Morris was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1889. Although he spent most of his life in England, he always identified as Welsh. Following his schooling he initially envisaged a career in the military; but after failing the army examinations he travelled to Canada at age seventeen, working in a variety of menial jobs. Returning to Wales he enrolled in the Royal College of Music briefly, before moving to Paris and studying at the Académie Delacluse in Montmartre until the outbreak of war forced his return to England. Morris’s life was changed forever in November 1918, when he met fellow artist Arthur Lett-Haines and the two fell immediately in love, despite Lett-Haines being already married at this time. The couple were to spend the rest of their lives together until Lett-Haines’s death in 1978. Their partnership, anchored by devotion both to each other and to each other’s art, was to survive across the intervening decades despite affairs by both parties, Morris’s with other men and Lett-Haines’s with both sexes.²Richard Morphet, Cedric Morris, London, Tate Gallery, 1984, p. 20.

After living together briefly in Cornwall in 1919 (where the pair became friends with fellow artists Frances Hodgkins, Frank Dobson, Laura Knight, and Ernest and Dod Procter, among others), Morris and Lett-Haines moved to Paris in 1920, then befriending Nancy Cunard, Peggy Guggenheim and Ernest Hemingway, as well as a raft of contemporary artists including Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Constantin Brancusi and Ossip Zadkine. Morris took occasional classes with Léger, Othon Friesz and André Lhote, which gave him a modernist perspective that married well with his subsequent discovery of the art of the Italian pre-Renaissance during a long stay in Italy in 1922.

When Cedric Morris held his first one-man exhibition in London in 1928, comprising  landscape, flower and bird subjects, critical reaction was mixed. The Times (1928) declared him to be:

One of the younger artists we do not feel quite sure about. He has talent and his colour is often thrilling, but at present he seems to be relying too much upon strangeness in subject-matter for his effects to inspire confidence. In painting birds, waterfowl in particular, he brings out the reptilian ancestry, which is undoubtedly there, and in painting flowers he inclines to the cactoid and the orchidaceous … What we cannot quite make up our minds about is whether Mr. Morris is original or only deliberately odd.³‘Mr. Cedric Morris’, Times, 10 May 1928, p. 14.

The Manchester Guardian (1928)’s critic felt, however, that Morris’s exhibition

deserves all the pleasant things that will be said about it … Mr Morris had not only a beautiful and remarkable sense and use of colour, but he is an ornithologist of more than ordinary quality. The result is that there has arisen among us (and this exhibition should convince those who were not aware of the fact) a modern painter who can paint birds – not photographically, but with the sympathy and succinctness that we associate with early Chinese masters. Mr Morris paints living, breathing, flying birds, not coloured reproductions of stuffed carcases.⁴D. C. F., ‘Birds, flowers, and landscapes’, The Manchester Guardian, 9 May 1928, p. 14.

Writing for The Studio (1928), Thomas Wade Earp noted the artist’s special affinity with bird subjects:

He is an admirable landscape painter because he is a good painter. He paints with amazing sensitiveness the beauty of bird-life because he has an understanding of it.⁵T. W. Earp, ‘Cedric Morris’, The Studio, vol. 96, no. 427, Oct. 1928, p. 245.

Virginian partridges, 1929, is a rich, tapestry-like study of these American game birds surrounded by an evocative terrain of cacti and succulents. Morris was keenly interested in both ornithology and the cultivation of exotic plants, and kept a lively menagerie of birds. Joan Warburton, who studied with Morris and Lett-Haines between 1937 and 1940, recalled the teaming bird life at Pound Farm (the couple’s property near Higham, Sussex, where Morris kept a lush garden, filled with exotic birds), as she describes:

[There was] Ptolemy the peacock who strutted about the garden and on the low walls trailing his long tail; Cockey the yellow-crested cockatoo; Rubio the scarlet, green and blue macaw, and ducks – Muscovy and Mallard … The parrots flew about the garden, swung on branches and stumped in and out of the house.⁶Joan Warburton, A Painter’s Progress: Part of a Life 1920–1987, manuscript, Tate Gallery Archives; quoted in Ben Tufnell, Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines: Teaching Art and Life, Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service and National Museums & Galleries of Wales, 2002, p. 9.

Zoo magazine (1936) noted Morris’s attitude towards rendering these living creatures:

Cedric Morris believes that a realistic picture, while useful if you want to identify the subject, does not necessarily give you the most vivid impression of its character. Therefore, having studied birds under all conditions, he simplifies and arranges them on canvas so that his design enhances the natural interest of the subject. ‘The intention’, in his own words, ‘is to provoke a lively sympathy with the mood of the birds which ornithological exactitude may tend to destroy’.⁷‘Animals in art. 2. Cedric Morris’, Zoo, Jul. 1936; quoted in Richard Morphet, Cedric Morris, Tate Gallery, London, 1984, p. 87.

In the context of England in 1929, Morris’s setting for his Virginian partridges would also have been seen as highly exotic. In the studio that he shared with Lett-Haines in Great Ormond Street, London, at this time, Morris ‘proudly displayed his collection of exotic cacti, specimens brought back from their travels to Algeria’.⁸John Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain, Manchester University Press, New York, 2014, p. 166. His love of unusual plants was at times seen as contrived or affected, however. In 1929, for example, reviewing the Seven and Five Society exhibition, the critic for The Connoissseur (1929) complained about ‘mannerisms that hamper rather than assist clarity of outlook’, declaring that ‘Mr Cedric Morris will have to lose his love of eccentricity, exemplified in the ridiculous group of cacti (nice enough in themselves) in his Portrait Group’.⁹‘Current art notes. The Seven and Five Society’, The Connoisseur, Jun. 1929, p. 379.

X-radiography of Virginian partridges reveals no compositional changes during the painting’s composition. Morris was renowned in fact for his ability to paint a picture directly, without preparatory underdrawing, working systematically from the top to the bottom of the composition. As art writer Herbert Furst explained in 1930:

He paints as one writes – that is, beginning at the top and finishing at the bottom, without any preliminary designing … He builds up his paintings as a bricklayer builds his walls, only, as we have noted, in the reverse order – downward.¹⁰Herbert Furst, ‘Mr Cedric Morris and his forthcoming exhibition at Messrs. Tooth’s’, Apollo, vol. 11, no. 63, Mar. 1930, pp. 220, 222.

Morris has applied his pigments thickly (with what writer T. W. Earp called ‘a matière [material] that one might consider a little too woolly’)¹¹Earp, T. W., ‘Cedric Morris’, 1928, p. 241. and the dry, chalky surface of Virginian partridges reflects the artist’s love of Italian frescoes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As the art commentator for The Scotsman(1932) noted:

Cedric Morris is a painter to rejoice in, especially for the critic condemned to walk weekly among acres of undistinguished daubs … His mere use of paint is ravishing. He applies it with wild prodigality, not merely to match natural textures (with these he is little concerned), but because paint is most delicious when dense.¹²‘Cedric Morris. A painter to rejoice in. R.B.A. exhibition. By our London art critic’, The Scotsman, 11 Apr. 1932, p. 13.

Virginian partridges was sold to Morris’s dealer, Dudley Tooth in 1929, and then loaned back for the solo exhibition that Morris held with Arthur Tooth, London in 1930.¹³Arthur Lett-Haines’s hand-written Book of Pictures contains the following entry for Virginian partridges: ‘Painted in 1929. First exhibited at Messrs A. Tooth and Sons one man show, March 1930 and sold to a member of the firm. Probably on contract notes i.e. £40. Later established bought by them on 1929 contract for £30 and sold again for £75 (or that was the catalogue price).’ Ann Jones, Modern Collection, Tate Gallery, letter to Annette Dixon, Curator, National Gallery of Victoria, 1 Jul. 1986. This was both commercially and critically successful for Morris, with the contemporary press noting that most of the show’s twenty-five works were sold before the afternoon of the private viewing. Virginian partridges remained in Dudley Tooth’s possession until May 1952, when it was acquired for the National Gallery of Victoria through Arthur Tooth & Sons. When this work was first placed on display in Melbourne in 1953, Gordon Thomson, Assistant and Curator of the Gallery, commented how:

Sir Cedric Morris’s Virginian partridges provides those momentary confusions of shape and pattern which enliven design. The picture is low in key, decorative, and its colour is related to nature in a way which distinguishes much English art from French, which in general has an intellectual basis.¹⁴The Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria, vol. vii, no. ii, 1953, n. p.

Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria