Arthur Lett-Haines

Arthur Lett-Haines was born in London on 2nd November 1984. He was a British painter and sculptor who experimented in many different media, gerneally characterising himself as an 'English surrealist.' He was part of a London artistic circle which included D.H Lawrence, the Sitwells and Wyndham Morris, but for most of his life he lived with the painter and gardener Cedric Morris in Cornwall, Paris and finally Suffolk. 

He served in the British Army during the First World War, before moving to Paris in 1920 and becoming part of an expatriate artistic community that included Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp and Ernest Hemmingway among others.
After moving back to England, Haines and Cedric Morris founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Dedham in 1937. The school relocated to Hadleigh operated on a live-in basis that mingled artistic development with a social circle and its pupils included Lucian Freud, Maggi Hambling and Glyn Morgan. In 1946, Lett Haines also became one of the founders of Colchester Art Society and later the Society's President.
The school closed when Haines died in 1978, though Morris continued to live at Benton End until his death in 1984. They are buried near each other at Hadleigh Cemetery in Hadleigh.

A retrospective exhibition was held at Redfern Gallery in 1984 and a joint Morris-Haines show entitled 'Teaching Art and Life' exhibition aired at the Norwich Castel Museum and Gallery in 2002–2003.