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The painter and horticulturalist Cedric Morris was born in Sketty, Swansea and studied in Paris. Morris met his lifelong companion, the artist Arthur Lett-Haines, in 1918. In 1937 they set up the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing together. Their pupils included Lucian Freud, who painted this portrait of his teacher in 1940. Freud later recalled ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more importantly to keep at it. He did not say much, but let me watch him at work. I have always admired his paintings and everything about him’.

The same year, Morris returned the compliment, and painted a portrait of his student (Tate Gallery). By this time, Freud's potential was already being widely discussed. On 7 March 1940, the 'Evening Standard' reported that he 'promises to be a remarkable painter ... intelligent and imaginative, with an instinctive rather than a scientific psychological sense'.