A first visit to Japan, and where to begin? The woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) are a marvellous starting point: full of detail, life, landscape, incident, and social history, plus they can be seen outside Japan, for example in the British Museum and The Met. There is currently a wonderful, extensive Hokusai/Hiroshige exhibition in Kyoto which includes many views of Mount Fuji. If you are lucky, you can see it from the Tokaido Shinkansen (bullet train), although this is not guaranteed. This is Tanabata Festival in Edo, one of Hiroshige's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (1852). 

The auctioneers Sworders has an interesting little piece about the art school at Benton End here. One of the things that made Cedric Morris such an outstandingly brilliant painter was his unique sense of colour. This is Drought, Oxfordshire 1933. And here again are the details about visiting Benton End: visits are available to book from 4 June to 19 July.

And this is the man himself in a 1930 self-portrait (at the National Portrait Gallery).

Benton End is the C16th house Cedric Morris lived in from 1939-82 and which was then a focus for a group of painters and writers that included 'Dickie' Chopping, Denis Wirth-Miller, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Stephen Spender and Ronald Blythe. The latter described the atmosphere there as 'robust and coarse, and exquisite and tentative all at once. Also faintly dangerous.' It was a very male atmosphere, quite different from the more domestic one at Great Bardfield or Charleston; it's one that we shall be hearing a lot about over the next few years because the magnificent Pinchbeck Charitable Trust has bought the house and given it to the Garden Museum (more details here and here). The restoration of both house and garden is well under way and soon Benton End will be as much an East Anglian mecca as Charleston is in Sussex.

Although Cedric Morris was an astonishing and miraculous painter of flowers, he was prolific and wide-ranging. This is From a Window at 45 Brook Street London W1 (1926) and it is in fact one of the greetings cards we sell in the shop, which we source from Orwell Press.

On the Post this week: the marvellous painter and gardener Cedric Morris (1889-1982). Here are some irises because they are spectacularly in bloom in the UK at the moment. This painting was once a Persephone Books card and maybe we should revive it.