1947/1 Portrait

1947/1 Portrait is the first of a series of pastels of human heads, four of which survive, in which the face appears to be assembled from irregular interlocking segments resembling biological cells. Completed when Morris was eighteen, the work already brings together the organic imagination, strong contour and fascination with living structures that would remain central to his art.

The head is recognisably human but resists conventional portraiture, with features displaced into a compact arrangement of rounded, cell-like forms that can also suggest a mask or an unknown organism. This ambiguity connects Morris’s interest in the subconscious with his growing scientific attention to anatomy, behaviour and the visual organisation of living things.

Pastel allows pigment to be applied directly and blended across the paper, giving the head its softly shifting passages of turquoise, green, violet and ochre. Morris contains those atmospheric colours within emphatic dark outlines, creating a tension between sensuous surface and a structure that feels almost diagrammatic.

Morris developed this segmented approach across a small group of early head studies, using repeated organic units to construct a figure without describing a particular sitter in naturalistic terms. A comparable device appeared much later in the work of Jean Dubuffet, but in Morris’s 1947 pastel it arose at the beginning of an independent Surrealist practice.

The pastel is an exceptionally early work, made before Morris’s first solo exhibition and subsequently shown as number one at Swindon Public Library in January 1948. Its direct provenance from the artist through the gallery, documented exhibition history and inclusion in the Catalogue Resume on pages 94 to 95 give it a particularly clear place within his developing career. The work measures 38 × 30.5 cm (15 × 12 in) and is professionally framed.

Morris pursued art and zoology in parallel, studying the subject at the University of Birmingham before completing a doctorate at Oxford and later researching animal behaviour at London Zoo. His training in ethology did not make the paintings scientific illustrations; instead, close observation and curiosity about behaviour gave his invented biomorphic forms an unusual sense of internal life.