Cedric Morris 1889-1982

Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines opened the East Anglian School of Painting in Dedham, Essex in 1937, relocating three years later to a 16th century farmhouse named Benton End in Suffolk. Their art school remained open throughout the Second World War, its rural setting and communal living providing a place of sanctuary for young artists. Morris was a notable plantsman and the subjects of this still life would have been grown in the gardens and later cooked up for the students. The Mediterranean peppers were unusual in England at this time, having been grown from seeds Morris brought back from a trip to Spain. Here they add an exotic presence to the otherwise native cast of characters played by the carrots, leeks and rhubarb.

The painting’s title refers to the Yalta Conference of February 1945 where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met to agree the partition of Europe. It's one of two allegorical pictures Morris made at the start and end of the war; the earlier picture Crisis, 1939, is a portentous image of birds gathered in a tree as if convened for a meeting.

Morris’s rich, flat colour and bold compositional design look to the French Post-Impressionists and to early Renaissance painters such as Giotto. His paintings are intensely observed with a pleasing sense of completeness. His idiosyncratic technique of starting a painting at the top left hand corner and working across the canvas until he reached the bottom right, requiring a precise vision of the finished painting from the start. 

This painting is one of Offer Waterman’s earliest acquisitions and was sold to the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull in 1998.