Cedric Morris at Philip Mould Gallery

I gather that a number of people have now been to see "Garden to Canvas - Cedric Morris and Benton End" at the Philip Mould Gallery at 18-19 Pall Mall (immediately opposite the Reform Club!) until 18th June 2025 - and liked it very much!

Garden to Canvas - Cedric Morris and Benton End

I saw it on Tuesday morning this week. The oil paintings are well worth viewing in terms of an artist who loved his plants and loved painting them. They also have enormous impact.

Benton End - his house and garden were also home to the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing established in 1937, which Lucian Freud joined in 1939.

Guest-curated by James Horner, Head Gardener at Benton End, the exhibition brings together works that have played a key role in the revival of Morris’s historic Suffolk garden.

Benton End, a sixteenth-century house near Hadleigh, was the home of Morris and his lifelong partner Arthur Lett-Haines (1894–1978). From this remarkable setting, the pair ran the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing – a place where art, horticulture, and community thrived side by side. With its free-flowing spirit, open-minded ethos, and rejection of academic conventions, Benton End became a haven for creative freedom. Many artists, including a young Lucian Freud, acknowledged that it was here where their true artistic identities first took root.

The works to revive the garden have been ongoing for some time and there's about another year to go. We have mentally made a date to visit Benton End - now a subsidiary of the Garden Museum - in Spring 2026 when hopefully the garden renovation will be complete and the irises will have returned and blooming again. Plus also see where Lucian Freud started out on his artistic career.

More oil paintings of flowers from the garden of Cedric Morris at Benton End

I'm putting an album of my photographs of the paintings in the gallery on Facebook and will come back and insert a link when I've done that

However I highly RECOMMEND that you download the excellent catalogue from the website and salivate over the paintings and the story of Cedric Morris in front of your computer.

CLICK HERE to download the exhibition handbook

See also 

• Benton End House & Gardens – Garden Museum
• Facebook - Benton End
• Instagram - Benton End

PS You can also see drawings and paintings by some early 20th century artists in the display in the basement - including 

• a wonderful painting of Tenerife by Cedric Morris (who will have been there for the plants!)
• a drawing by Augustus John. A snip at ££38,500