This British surrealist is a revelation

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.’

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. Now, with alumni like Hambling and Lucian Freud, the school’s fame is threatening to eclipse the reputations of both. Benton End was the focus of Firstsite’s 2021 exhibition; this one puts its founders in the frame.

From their formative years in Paris in the 1920s, their two lives ran in parallel but their art diverged. A pair of landscapes they painted in Assisi in 1922 look superficially similar, until you notice the lilac horse Lett-Haines has introduced into his. In Paris he took to surrealism like a duck to water, developing his own rather sinister version: there’s something faintly demonic about the black and blue silhouetted figures cavorting in a half-lit landscape in ‘The Escape’ (1931), and there are shades of Richard Dadd in the dense, over-luscious vegetation of ‘Jeunes Filles aux Fleurs’ (1935) – the ‘jeunes filles’ consisting of a snake and an ominous magpie (see below).