Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris

Cedric Lockwood Morris was born on 11 December 1889 in Sketty, near Swansea, in South Wales, the son of the industrialist Sir George Lockwood Morris and his wife Wilhelmina, nee Cory. He was educated at St Cyprian's School in Eastbourne and then Charterhouse School, and enrolled at the Royal College of Music in London to study singing rather than art. His turn to painting came later, through study at the Academie Delecluse in Paris from April 1914, interrupted by the First World War, and at other Paris academies in the years that followed.

Through the 1920s Morris built a London profile with two one-man exhibitions and appearances in more than twenty group shows, largely through the Redfern Gallery, and became a recognized figure in modern British art circles. He lived for roughly sixty years with the painter Arthur Lett-Haines. In 1929 the couple took a lease on Pound Farm in Higham, Suffolk, and in 1937 they founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, which ran until 1978 and became a center for painting instruction in the region. The couple later settled at Benton End, near Hadleigh, Suffolk, which became as well known for Morris's garden and iris breeding as for the school itself.

Morris succeeded to the family baronetcy as the 9th Baronet, Morris of Clasemont, in 1947. He continued to paint, garden, and teach at Benton End for the rest of his life. He died on 8 February 1982 at the age of ninety-two, in Ipswich, Suffolk, according to genealogical records. He is buried in Hadleigh, Suffolk, alongside Lett-Haines.

Morris's critical standing rests on his dual identity as painter and plantsman, a combination that dealers and curators have leaned into in recent exhibitions. A cluster of 2018 shows, Philip Mould & Company's "Beyond the Garden Wall," the Garden Museum's "Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman," and a renewed presentation at Gainsborough's House, treated his travel paintings, garden subjects, and horticultural expertise together as a single body of work. Gainsborough's House installed a permanent display of Morris portraits in 2022, and Philip Mould returned to his flower paintings in 2025 with "Garden To Canvas: Cedric Morris & Benton End." No verifiable exact quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here; the pattern of institutional and dealer attention over the past decade is nonetheless a clear sign of a reputation still being actively reassessed.

Morris's auction market has been active but comparatively modest in scale relative to his institutional standing. Sworders set a reported auction record for the artist of GBP 204,160 for the painting Foxglove on 22 October 2019. Anderson & Garland has also reported strong group results for Morris, including a sale described as totaling about GBP 250,000 across several works, though a complete, ranked account of his top auction results could not be confirmed from public sources. Morris is currently handled on the secondary market principally by Philip Mould & Company and Richard Green in London, both of which maintain dedicated artist pages and have mounted repeated solo exhibitions of his work.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Morris, which places extra weight on provenance and on the expertise of dealers such as Philip Mould & Company and Richard Green, both of which are active in verifying and placing his work. His reported auction high is GBP 204,160 for Foxglove at Sworders on 22 October 2019, though a complete, ranked account of his top results could not be confirmed from public sources. Collectors should treat any single headline price as a snapshot of a market still in relatively early stages of reappraisal rather than a settled benchmark, and should look to his deep representation in Tate, the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, and other public collections as the more stable signal of his standing.