Benton End revisited

‘I wish to goodness you’d never set foot in Benton End,’ Maggi Hambling’s mother told the artist.

But, Hambling says, ‘It was too late.’ In 1960, the 15-year-old Hambling took her first two oil paintings to Benton End, a 16th-century Suffolk manor house – known as ‘the Artists’ House’ – in the nearby town of Hadleigh.

One of the artists, Arthur Lett-Haines (1894-1978), known as Lett, answered the door. The other artist, his partner, Sir Cedric Morris Bt (1889-1982), was having dinner. After dinner, both artists carefully examined the pictures.

Hambling writes in ‘I received encouraging – though completely contradictory – criticism from each of them. I finally left what in Hadleigh was considered a notorious house at 9.30 in