When the 15-year-old Maggi Hambling arrived at Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk – home of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing – with two paintings to show the school’s founders, Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, she was ushered into the dining room where Morris was having dinner. He made some criticisms but was very encouraging, then Lett-Haines came in and made the opposite criticisms but was encouraging too. As teachers, both believed in bringing out a student’s native talent – but as artists and characters, says Hambling: ‘They were polar opposites.’
‘Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend,’ Morris regretted
One aim of this new exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, their first joint retrospective for 50 years, is to bring Lett-Haines out from under Morris’s shadow. From their first fateful meeting in 1918 at an Armistice Day party, Lett-Haines would devote himself to promoting Morris’s career, then managing – and cooking for – the school they founded together in 1937: ‘Which is why people haven’t heard of Lett,’ explains Hambling.
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