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Towards the end of his career Cedric Morris turned increasingly towards pottery as the main subject of his still-life paintings. The present work, painted in 1968, is one of the more notable examples of Morris’s ‘pot-studies’ and is well known within his recorded oeuvre.

Benton End, the 16th century house in Suffolk where Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines (1894-1978) lived from 1940, was filled with souvenirs from Morris’s extensive travels abroad. Chief amongst these were endless varieties of pots which were acquired by Morris over a fifty year period from places as far flung as Libya. The pots would serve a dual purpose for an ‘artist-plantsman’ like Morris. They were, on the one hand, of great use for potting plants (Morris’s garden was world-famous), but they would also provide a constant source of inspiration for his art. Exotic pots featured in Morris’s work throughout his life and nearly all of his best-known still-lives show his flower subject (often irises) propped up in an unusual vase or pot, often with a distinct Mediterranean look. From the 1960s, however, Morris began to give prominence to the pots themselves and they were elevated from mere secondary vessels in which the main subject sat to the main focal point in his compositions.

The present work has always been considered a prime example of Morris’s still-life work and was included in the seminal exhibition of his art staged at the Tate Gallery in 1984 (no. 103). Remarkably, there is also an old photograph published in the Essex County Standard in 1968 that shows Morris standing in his studio with the present work on an easel to the left and the pumpkin and pots laid out on a table to the right (see below). It is a rare glimpse into Morris’s working methods inside the studio and allows us to better appreciate the way he would play with the perspective of his subject in the pursuit of a harmonious, pleasing composition.