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 George Morland 
 
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GEORGE MORLAND 
 
GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 AND THE EVOLUriON FROM HIM 
 OF SOME LATER PAINTERS 
 
 J. T. NETTLESHIP 
 
 Author of " Robert Broivning : Essays and Thoughts " 
 
 IVITH THIRTY-EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED 
 
 38 Great Russell Street 
 1898 
 
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, 
 London & Bungay. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE ... ... ... ... ... i 
 
 Tendencies of his time and bringing up — ^^^sthetic influences and heredity — 
 Early taskwork— Sir Joshua Reynolds and Romney — Morland's later life. 
 
 H. MORLAND THE PAINTER ... ... ... ... ... 20 
 
 From Morland to Millet and Bastien Lepage — Notes on Morland's methods of work, 
 and his contemporaries' opinion — Evolution from him through Millet and 
 Lepage to some later English painters. 
 
 III. EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK ... ... ... ... 52 
 
 i. Some pictures by Morland, with some notes on pictures by Ward and Gains- 
 
 borough. 
 
 ii. Some mezzotints, etchings, and engravings after Morland. 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 COPPER PLATES 
 
 The Dram. Collection of Sir Walter Gilbey. 
 Inside of a Stable. National Gallery. 
 Horses in a Stable. South Kensington Museum. 
 The Turnpike Gate. Collection of John Fleming, Esq. 
 
 Wreckers. Collection of Sir Walter Gilbey. 
 A Gipsy Encampment. Collection of Sir Walter Gilbey. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS PRINTED IN SEPIA 
 
 George MorlaND. From the Portrait painted and mezzotinted by J. Raphael Smith. 
 
 George Morland. From a sketch in water-colours by T. Rowlattdson, British Museum. 
 
 Valentine's Day. By G. Morland. South Kensington Museum. 
 
 Fishermen. By James Ward. Collection of John Fleming, Esq. 
 
 Coming Storm. By James Ward. Collection of Sir Charles S. Hamilton. 
 
 Boys Robbing an Orchard. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Charles Tennant. 
 
 Playing at Soldiers. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Charles Ten7ia7tt. 
 
 The Alehouse Door. By G. Morland. Collection of George Salting, Esq. 
 
 A Mare and Foal. By G. Morland. Collection of John Fleming, Esq. 
 
 A Mare and Foal. By G. Stubbs. Collection of Sir Charles S. Hamilton. 
 
 The Market Cart. By G. Morland. Collection of G. Harland Peck, Esq. 
 
 Children Fishing. By G. Morland. Collection of G. Harland Peck, Esq. 
 
 Sea Coast, Men and Boats. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Charles S. Hatnilton. 
 
 Landscape by Julius C^sar Ibbetson, with Figures by G. Morland. 
 Collection of Sir Charles S. Hamilton. 
 
 Strawy ARD, with Horses and Cattle. By J. F. Herring. 
 
 Collection of Sir Charles S. Hai7iilton. 
 
 Gipsies. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Charles S. Hamilton. 
 Studies of Hands. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Charles S. Hamilton. 
 
Vlll 
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Sketch of a Man pouring Pigwash into a Tub. By G. Morland. 
 Collection of Sir Charles S. Hamiltoft. 
 
 Sketch of a Ram's Head. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Charles S. Hamilton. 
 
 Horse from "The Death of the Fox." By G. Morland. 
 
 Collection of Sir Walter Gilbey. 
 
 Gathering Sticks. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Walter Gilbey. 
 
 The Deserter's Farewell. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Walter Gilbey. 
 
 Innocence Alarmed, or the Flash in the Pan. By G. Morland. 
 Collection of Sir Walter Gilbey. 
 
 The Blind White Horse. By G. Morland. Collection of Canon Phillips. 
 
 Morland's Servant, Simpson. By G. Morland. Collection of Canon Phillips. 
 
 The Day after the Wreck. By G. Morland. Collection of Canon Phillips. 
 
 The Disconsolate and her Parrot. By G. Morland. Collection of Canon Phillips. 
 
 The Ferry Boat. By G. Morland. Collection of Canon Phillips. 
 
 Girl on a Seashore on a Windy Day. By G. Morland. Collection of Canon Phillip. 
 
 Study of a Greyhound. By G. Morland, British Museum. 
 
 Studies of Children. By G. Morland. Froin engravings in the British Museum. 
 
GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 I 
 
 SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE 
 
 Tendencies of his time and bringing up — ^Esthetic influences and heredity — Early taskwork 
 — Sir Joshua Reynolds and Romney — Morland's later life. 
 
 In two or three respects George Morland is unique ; to mention the 
 least important first, his life was written and published four times, within 
 three years of his death, by four different persons, two of whom claim to 
 have been personal friends. He is unique in combining great genius as a 
 painter with complete absence of what is usually called morality in either 
 its social or commercial sense, though he earned by painting enough 
 money to have died a well-to-do man, and lived at a time when such a 
 work-a-day morality was at least as essential as it is to-day in order to 
 secure even a small measure of success in life. The most remarkable point, 
 however, is that for all this lack of any sense either of citizenship or of 
 the smallest ordinary social obligation, — notwithstanding the fact that 
 after twenty years of a dim and industrious captivity at home, he rioted 
 through his remaining twenty-one years like a monstrous grown-up 
 school-boy, incessantly engaged in practical jokes of an elemental kind, 
 herding with all manner of brute-humanity, riding, boxing, larking, 
 fighting, consorting with gipsies, drinking incredibly and with gradually 
 lessening intervals of sobriety, — he yet was in art almost if not quite 
 unconsciously to himself a creator, a pioneer, the beginner of a style ; a 
 hard worker at painting as well as at playing the goat. He was the first 
 painter in England, the first in Europe after the great Dutchmen of the 
 two centuries preceding his, to seize on the life at his door, in the fields 
 and lanes, the farmyards and alehouses, on the sea-coasts and by the 
 inland waters of his own country, as the subjects on which to exercise the 
 
 B 
 
2 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 genius for painting which burned in him through the whole of his life, in 
 whatever dens he chose to wallow. 
 
 But though Morland's physical life, almost from his twenty-first year 
 to the end, was so ungoverned, so abnormal that its very monstrosity 
 might seem to preclude any considerations of heredity, it is worth while 
 to say something about the tendency of his time, the tendency of his 
 bringing up, and what little can be known of hereditary bias at least. So 
 in the attempt to realize a mental portrait of him, the first thing, I take it, 
 is to get as accurate an idea as possible of the traditions which were at his 
 back, both national and in his own particular line, the splendour or 
 influence of those traditions, and whether they formed a solid point 
 dappui to start from, gave a convention to defy on the one hand, or a 
 torch to be carried on, on the other. The next thing is, before touching 
 on the personality of the man, to find all that can be known of his 
 bringing up and surroundings, and the infinitely subtle influences daily at 
 work to form or deform character. And thirdly we should glance, 
 however briefly, at the contemporary as distinguished from traditional 
 influences in his early life, in the particular line in which he achieved 
 eminence, and note whether these influences were such as to help or 
 hinder him, taking into account his temperament and character, as 
 the former was born with him and the latter moulded by circumstances. 
 
 In the twenty years following 1763, the date of George Morland's 
 birth, England was scarcely gaining prestige in her naval and military 
 tradition, though martial spirit, according to Sir Walter Besant, ran high, 
 and it was a great time for fighting in streets and roads. Every man 
 who went out of doors knew " that he might have to fight, to defend 
 himself against foot-pad or bully ; most men carried a stout stick." The 
 police or constables, when first appointed and for long after, were 
 practically useless. " The drinking of the last century went far beyond 
 anything recorded ; all classes drank ; they began to drink hard about 
 1730, and they kept it up for one hundred years with great spirit and 
 admirable results, which we, their grandchildren, are now illustrating. 
 In 1736 there were 7044 gin-shops in London — one house in six — and 
 3200 alehouses where gin was secretly sold. The people all went mad 
 after gin. The clergy, merchants, lawyers, judges, the most responsible 
 people, drank more than freely ; the lowest classes spent all their money 
 in drink, especially in gin, upon which they could get drunk for two-pence. 
 
SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE 3 
 
 " There were plenty of sermons and ' sound doctrine,' but of duties 
 and responsibilities of citizens never a word was said. The same 
 men who would, with pray^ers, discuss the meaning of a text, would 
 take a share in a slaver, watch a flogging at the cart-tail, or the hang- 
 ing of a poor woman for stealing a loaf, would pay their servants a 
 bare subsistence, making twenty-fold profit themselves, and think they 
 did God service." 
 
 It is easy to imagine that such being the state of things physically 
 and morally in London, in the houses of quiet folk, such as Morland's 
 parents, the idea of safe respectability rather than daring and uncertain 
 enterprise would become dominant, and children would be reared in 
 caution and timid seclusion, with industry for a motto and solvency for a 
 guiding star. And in 1769, and onwards for a year or two, the state of 
 political and social life might well alarm timid and ungifted men like 
 George Morland's father still further in the direction of a cloistral 
 bringing up for children. Such influences in the ordinary social way 
 must have had their eflect in the numbing and retardation, the dwindling 
 by atrophy, of George Morland's moral and originating mental force. 
 We may take it, therefore, that during his boyhood and youth national 
 tradition, national life abroad or at home, did little to inspire him. What 
 of artistic, esthetic influences ? What traditions in English art existed 
 for him ? Did these traditions give a convention to defy, which would 
 be a good thing for an original mind to work against, or a torch to carry 
 on which would be a good thing for enthusiasm ? Vandyck could hardly 
 be reckoned an English master, Hogarth died the year after Morland was 
 born, and there is no sign in any of Morland's biographies that Hogarth's 
 work was ever studied by him or made the smallest impression on him, 
 though Dawe casually remarks that he admired it. Richard Wilson's work 
 had hardly ripened to the state of tradition, for at Morland's birth that 
 great landscape painter was not only living but had only just reached the 
 highest point of such fame as this life was to give him, and he did not 
 die till Morland's nineteenth year. Wright of Derby was living, and as 
 famous as he too was destined to be during his life, in Morland's 
 boyhood and early manhood. The elder Nasmyth was a contemporary. 
 It is true that J. Hassell in his life of George Morland (published 1805) 
 says that Morland at the time he first commenced landscape painting 
 had no small "obstacles to encounter. Gainsborough was yet living. 
 
4 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 Wilson's productions were sought after with avidity. Wright of 
 Derby was upon the meridian of estimation." And certainly Mr. Hassell 
 finds a convention to defy ; for, says he, Morland " found the English 
 School in the beaten track of plagiarism." We need not, however, 
 attach too much importance to these dicta as to Gainsborough and 
 Wilson. Of the influence on Morland of Gainsborough's early landscape 
 and animal work, more will be said ; with regard to Wilson, it must be 
 remembered that Hassell wrote as a strong partisan shortly after Morland's 
 death, was influenced by the fact that Wilson's work had come into its 
 heritage only after that artist's death, and therefore might easily 
 exaggerate Wilson's eflect on Morland, although as a matter of fact 
 during Wilson's lifetime that painter's work was not appreciated at its 
 true worth. Dawe indeed tells us that Morland admired Wilson's work, 
 as he did Hogarth's ; but that was after his own style was formed, and 
 when even his own work was beginning to decline. We may take it, in 
 short, that for any influence, bad or good, which the work of any then 
 deceased English masters had on Morland, tradition in English art 
 scarcely existed as a factor. 
 
 So much for the second head of tradition, the aesthetic influence from 
 dead predecessors. 
 
 As for the third head, the contemporary aesthetic influence, we may 
 for the present summarize it very shortly by mentioning the names of 
 Morland's contemporaries — Reynolds, Gainsborough (then in his later 
 time), Romney, Hoppner. A strong array of helpers in an arduous climb 
 towards the peaks of art. But how far personally and apart from their 
 painted work they helped or hindered, — on this point, there will be a word 
 or two to say later on. Let us now, bearing in mind the four heads 
 under which George Morland's life, moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and 
 physical, may have been influenced for good or ill, come to details. And 
 first of his birth and bringing up. 
 
 His grandfather, George Henry Morland, and his father, Henry 
 Robert Morland, were both painters. Two examples of the latter's work 
 are in the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square ; they are called each 
 by the same title. The Laundry Maid, are highly-finished meritorious 
 works of unredeemed mediocrity, though from them a sense of feminine 
 grace and charm peeps out ; they are, it is suggested, portraits, either of 
 the Misses Gunning or of his own daughters. He painted George HI.'s 
 
SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE 
 
 5 
 
 portrait (engraved by Houston) and Garrick's (now in the Garrick Club). 
 Mr. Hassell says one of Morland's sisters, " now married " [evidently 
 Mrs. Wm. Ward] *' may lay claim to genius . . . little inferior to her 
 brother's ; a painting of hers is still extant representing Mr. Garrick in the 
 character of Richard HI." Query: is this the portrait in the Garrick Club 
 attributed to George Morland's father? His grandfather, George Henry 
 Morland, seems to have been a painter of the same calibre — a hopeless 
 mediocrity whose work also was engraved (by Watson and Philip Dawe). 
 Both these progenitors of George appear to have lived blameless and 
 obscure lives ; respectability was their God, at least Henry Robert's, and 
 yet the latter was a persistently unsuccessful man, not seldom in low 
 water financially, trying various dodges such as picture dealing and 
 restoring, selling art materials and so on, to gain a livelihood. His 
 wife, an artist also, exhibited twice at the R.A. in 1785-86, one work each 
 year. James Ward in his autobiography says she was a Frenchwoman 
 by birth. He describes her husband and herself as follows. " George 
 Morland's father was of a good family, and descended from a baronet of 
 the same name, . . . and he always appeared to me as a broken-down 
 gentleman. His wife was of an opposite character, and was to me (if 
 I may use the comparison) like a little strutting bantam cock. She had 
 a small independent property, and she crowed over her quiet husband 
 most completely. She had three sons and two daughters ; her partiality 
 was to her son George and his youngest sister Sophia. . . . The elder 
 §ister was a most exemplary character " [afterwards James Ward's sister- 
 in-law], "and the more praiseworthy as being brought up under the 
 greatest temptations to the contrary. One son went to sea. He 
 returned to England once, after which he went to sea again and was 
 never afterwards heard of. The other brother Henry was a dealer in 
 everything, a business for which his mind was exactly fitted, being an 
 eccentric money-making character. Latterly he opened a coffee-house in 
 Dean Street, Soho, and became the last and most constant dealer in his 
 brother George's pictures, and I believe had a greater number of them 
 copied and sold as originals than all the other dealers put together. 
 The elder Morland lived a very retired life." James Ward says a 
 little later, speaking of George Morland's wandering propensities — 
 This appeared to be a family failing, for his sister Maria, my brother's 
 wife, showed the same disposition ; but it was the only fault she had." 
 
6 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 The foregoing quotations give a good glimpse of hereditary bias ; and 
 now let us hear what Mr. Collins, Mr. Blagdon, Mr. Hassell, and Mr. 
 Dawe have to say about George's boyhood and youth. Collins says — 
 " At a very early period he was admitted as a student at the Royal 
 Academy, Somerset House. . . . On his way to and from the Academy" 
 [as a mere boy] " he had frequently observed some of his brother students 
 who were much older than himself, stop at a dram-shop near Exeter 
 Change, most of whom were loud in their praises of gin. After several 
 efforts to conquer a natural shyness ... he entered the shop, and 
 having drunk a small glass " [of gin] " liked it so very much that he never 
 after could forget this premature and unfortunate attachment which 
 accompanied him through life (p. 13). . . After some years at the R. A. 
 his father, who dealt in and cleaned pictures, procured him some of the 
 finest productions of the Dutch and Flemish schools, as well as the best 
 drawings of the celebrated masters of Italy. ... He neglected the 
 Roman School. . . . The colouring of Hobbema, the spirit and freedom 
 of Ruysdael, and the neatness of pencil peculiar to Paul Potter, Cuyp, 
 Carl du Jardin, and Adrian Van de Velde seem to have at times engrossed 
 his attention, and they certainly were, as he always declared them to be, 
 his chief favourites. . . . When his genius had been exercised for some 
 years in copying from the best masters of Holland and Flanders, several 
 specimens" [? copies] "his father disposed of to great advantage. . . . 
 Several instances are known to the family of his father having sold copies 
 by his son after Ruysdael, Hobbema and others, for originals." 
 
 Blagdon says — " He drew a spider with charcoal on the ceiling of the 
 servant-girls' bedroom, and they took it for a real one. ... He drew a 
 beetle on the hearth which completely deceived his father, who tried to 
 crush it with his foot. . . . When a boy he took infinite delight in 
 dissecting dead mice." 
 
 Dawe says, in almost direct contradiction to Collins, that " from an 
 anxious regard for his morals, he was not permitted to study at the 
 Academy ; he nevertheless once, about his twentieth year, unknown to 
 his father, showed some of his drawings to the keeper, and obtained 
 permission to draw as a candidate for becoming a student ; yet ... he 
 drew there only three nights, though he occasionally attended the lectures. 
 He paid some attention to the anatomy of the human figure, and 
 executed many drawings both of the skeleton and muscles. . . . The 
 
SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE 
 
 7 
 
 anatomy of the horse he studied from the work of Stubbs, whose prints he 
 copied in Indian ink, and wrote the names of the bones and muscles on 
 his drawings. He likewise made clay models from Gainsborough's horse 
 and other casts of a similar kind. ... He made many copies of 
 Gainsborough's celebrated picture of pigs. ... At the age of eighteen 
 he formed the intention of adopting a new style of painting. . . . During 
 his apprenticeship " [to his father] " he devoted much time to reading ; 
 the fine art treatises he especially studied were those of Du Fresnoy and 
 Webb. . . . His general reading must have been various, and at this 
 time he had the character of being polite and well informed. His chief 
 source of information was a dictionary of arts and sciences. His inquisitive 
 spirit enabled him in all societies to gain additional knowledge. His 
 talent for seizing advantages appears always to have been one of his 
 chief means of improvement, and while young he everywhere excited a 
 prepossession in his favour." 
 
 " George," says Mr. Hassell, " was at a very early age instructed in 
 his father's profession, and such were the promising productions of his 
 infant days that great hopes were entertained that he might hereafter be 
 the means of assisting his father. We need not be surprised at his rapid 
 improvement when we consider his close confinement in an upper room 
 in his father's house, where he was constantly employed copying drawings, 
 pictures, or plaster casts, with scarce a respite for his meals. . . . He 
 was almost entirely restricted from society, except what was acquired by 
 §tealth with a few boys in the neighbourhood ; his principal amusement 
 was a walk on Sunday with his father to view the new buildings in the 
 vicinity of Tottenham Court. . . . When not more than fourteen his 
 pecuniary supplies for the amusements in which he secretly participated 
 were derived from copying and drawing more pictures within the limited 
 time than his father had prescribed or indeed judged it possible for him to 
 execute. These were conveyed to his youthful acquaintance to be 
 disposed of on certain conditions ; indeed, so dexterously was the plan 
 contrived that George is reported to have fastened these spoils, the 
 result of his ingenuity, to a string, and let them down from the window to 
 his associates, who were ready to receive them ; and the fruits of this 
 traffic were of course appropriated to their common amusements." 
 
 So the implication from the foregoing quotations is pretty obvious : 
 Morland under the guise of an apprentice was put hard at work — and 
 
8 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 that was a very good thing — but was also made to supply his father's 
 exchequer by the proceeds of such drawings and copies of old masters 
 as he was set to make. That he managed to supply his own needs 
 as well by extra work shows his extraordinary facility already, and it is 
 a bright spot in a gloomy life to think that he, in after days so utterly 
 regardless of commercial honour, chose an honourable rather than a 
 more dubious way of filling his purse when a boy. 
 
 "We could not," says Ward, but admire his genius, and I took 
 great delight in seeing him paint" [he is speaking of Morland at the 
 age of eighteen or twenty], "but, alas! his subjects were for the most 
 part then wrong, and it was more wrong my being allowed to see 
 such works at my age. But it was then the fashion, and was thought 
 nothing of : it was before the French Revolution, and our country was 
 impregnated with this dire evil." Ward, it appears, connects the story 
 (as told by Hassell) of George Morland's being locked up to work in 
 his father's house with the production of immodest pictures, which may 
 or may not mean nude paintings. Ward does not believe George 
 Morland's father knew at all of these works, and suggests that George, 
 instead of being locked up by his father, locked himself in, to conceal 
 the nature of his occupation. Probably both Ward and Hassell's 
 accounts have each their own truth ; it seems very likely that George 
 Morland's work at pot boiling on his own account would be such 
 subjects as above suggested, and that he would keep them secret from 
 his Simon Pure of a parent. But on one point his biographers are 
 unanimous ; except in very early manhood, and then only (as presently 
 specified) under strong compulsion — he never in his life painted a gross 
 or lascivious picture ; and it seems therefore only fair to assume that 
 these early essays were merely done to get pocket money, and by no 
 means from natural depravity. 
 
 Note, in connection with what has been said at the outset as to 
 national tradition, Ward's quaint jeremiad over the then fashion — 
 " this dire evil." Evidently Ward thought that the country, on looking 
 back to the time of his own youth, was at that period going to the 
 dogs — "for it was before the French Revolution." All that concerns 
 us here, except in a very secondary degree, is that none of this early 
 student work of Morland's is probably in existence, or at any rate 
 available for criticism, to-day, and that it could not have been of great 
 
SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE 
 
 9 
 
 excellence, judging from works of his sixteenth and seventeenth years 
 which I have seen. 
 
 From the foregoing notes of Morland's boyhood two facts are 
 apparent ; the secluded drudgery of his youth would have crushed out 
 the life of any but a genius in painting, and it was in a great measure 
 the cause of his outbreak into absurd dissipation. His tragic end was 
 brought on by his own monstrous waywardness, fostered by circum- 
 stances. Mr. Hassell draws the same conclusion as to the dissipation 
 resulting from the previous mewing up ; while he adds, rightly enough 
 as will be seen presently, that from this seeming evil (of solitary 
 confinement), " a considerable degree of real good was educed ; for it 
 was from these habits of industry, which had struck so deeply into 
 his nature as never to be eradicated, that he acquired so familiar a 
 knowledge of the materials of his art, and that prompt and skilful 
 application of them." 
 
 Still, so far as we have come, we find George Morland heavily 
 handicapped for his race of life. A waning national prestige, a dead 
 level of mediocrity in achievement on the part of his immediate 
 predecessors, mediocrity and stuffy respectability in all the social life 
 he had access to as a lad, possibly even on the inner side of Sir 
 Joshua's own front door a lofty propriety — were not these heavy weights 
 to lay on this man of two nations, English and French, come apparently 
 of gentle blood, put in harness too heavy for his high breed ? And 
 instead of saying what wonder, let us go a step further and try to find 
 some reason for the mad outbreaks of his youth, and for what Mr. 
 Hassell calls "his maitvaise konte, and disrelish for elegant society." 
 
 "Morland was ever," says Ward, "the object of strange and odd 
 movements, but while with us he was ever at work. ... I remember 
 asking him if he could ever be happy without painting — he answered 
 ' No, never ! ' . . . George Morland's father at one time was very 
 intimate with Sir Joshua Reynolds, but he failed and became a 
 bankrupt, and on his going as before to breakfast with his friend, Sir 
 Joshua took no more notice of him than if there had been no one 
 there, and gave as a reason that it was a disgrace to an artist to become 
 a bankrupt. In his son George's early boyhood he introduced him to 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was very hopeful as to the early display of 
 genius, but I never heard of his making any effort to get him to draw 
 
lO 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 at the R. A. or at any other school." And Hassell says that Sir 
 Joshua's gallery was ever after accessible to the young artist, and that he 
 was allowed to borrow and make copies of the President's works ; and at 
 this time Morland made what proved a very successful copy of Sir Joshua's 
 Garrick between Comedy and Tragedy then in possession of Mr. 
 Angerstein at Blackheath. "Mr. Angerstein . . . wished to inspect the 
 progress of the work, but Morland refused to begin the picture until 
 it was solemnly promised that no person whatever should overlook 
 him, and that while at work he should be allowed to act in the house 
 as he might think proper. This agreement was literally adhered to. 
 The picture was finished ; and during the progress of the work, George 
 associated with the domestics, eating and drinking in the servants' hall, 
 but no persuasion or entreaties could ever allure him within reach of 
 Mr. Angerstein, his family, or visitors." This associating with the 
 servants is denied by Dawe, who also says the picture was copied 
 not at Blackheath, but at Mr. Angerstein's h ouse in the City. 
 
 Is it not reasonable to suggest that the President's treatment of the 
 bankrupt father, according to Ward's story, may have helped to determine 
 the tendency shown by the son in his youth to that wayward hatred 
 of polite society which became a fixed aversion in his later years ? 
 
 George Morland was introduced " in his early boyhood," we see, 
 to Sir Joshua Reynolds; that is, at a time (say 1775 or 1776, or even 
 earlier) when Sir Joshua, not much past fifty, was in the zenith of 
 his power, a knight of six or seven years' standing, the first President 
 of the then infant Royal Academy. George Morland would then be 
 a boy of twelve or thirteen, very impressionable even on the painting 
 side of him, still more so by the weight of prestige embodied 
 in the great painter. Sir Joshua was the son of a clergyman and 
 school-master, and so far as one knows of almost aggressively philistine, 
 bourgeois, correct life — a state of things which makes his unmatchable 
 genius the more wonderful ; and I cannot help fancying that the school- 
 master heredity may have had a chilling and antagonistic effect on [the 
 young boy, while in spite of it he bowed down before the splendour of the 
 work. It is easy to imagine that if Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mr. 
 Angerstein were, as they must have been by all accounts, the first 
 specimens of refined social life George Morland had seen when he 
 came to shake off his father's trammels, the wild blood in him revolted 
 
SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE 
 
 II 
 
 at their prosaic unbending manner, and his spirit, always on the look- 
 out for sympathy, failed to see the sterling qualities hidden beneath 
 the buckram of convention. 
 
 Thus, I repeat, he started handicapped by his own mixed race, by 
 the natural independence of good breeding and descent ; and he set his 
 face against the proprieties almost before he had a chance of learning 
 what they were, and what might be got by in some degree propitiating 
 Mrs. Grundy. 
 
 At any rate revolt he did, at the first moment he was free of his 
 apprenticeship : enough has been said above to show how long the 
 revolt had been preparing, how long even before he reached manhood 
 he had lived in his father's house like a wild creature from another 
 land, living his own dreams amid commonplace surroundings. 
 
 Reverting now to the third head, of the influence of great con- 
 temporaries, we have seen that according to his light, and within the 
 limitations of his character, Sir Joshua really did his best to help 
 Morland in his opening career, notwithstanding Ward's deprecatory 
 remarks on that help as quoted above. Only one other great master 
 of that time made any advances in the same direction towards 
 Morland, but these advances were very genuine, and what one would 
 expect from the genius of George Romney. He, it appears, offered, 
 before the apprenticeship to Morland senior came to an end, to take 
 George into his own house with a salary of ;z^300 a year, on condition 
 of his signing articles for three years. But George had had enough 
 of restraint, and refused, declaring, says Mr. Richardson, "that one 
 experience of articles had frightened him for the rest of his life. He had 
 never known freedom before ; he resolved to have it now." (Richardson, 
 p. 20.) 
 
 Such, then, was the result on Morland of the state of the times, the 
 lack of tradition, the recluse manner of his bringing up, and what little 
 influence contemporary genius may have had upon him. Wild and 
 ungovernable by nature, to be led probably but not driven, all his worst 
 proclivities claimed their own as soon as his unfortunate body was free to 
 walk whither it would. For a year or two he seems to have led a 
 reckless and jovial but not besotted life, showing a good deal of courage, 
 skill, and bodily strength in fighting, riding, and racing, but painting all 
 the time, all the time making money — and, alas! all the time spending 
 
12 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 it. For a period of from seven to ten years from his twenty-first birthday 
 we may take it that George Morland, however wild his Hfe, was a slave 
 to none of his worst propensities ; and we need go no farther to prove 
 this than our own National Gallery, and a few private collections in 
 London and the home counties, where are to be seen works such as no 
 dipsomaniac or hopeless debauchee could have produced, — works which 
 hold their ground side by side with the greatest achievements in paint 
 of the greatest Dutch masters, and far surpass anything in the same line 
 produced by contemporary or previous English painters. 
 
 All readers of this essay will have read or can procure Mr. Ralph 
 Richardson's concise and masterly summary : of Morland's life.^ But 
 before leaving this part of my subject it may be well to note a few 
 statements gathered from the four biographies of Morland, published 
 a few years after his death, so that a fairly complete portrait of the man 
 as apart from the artist may be given, as far as is possible at this distance 
 of time. 
 
 " After Morland became his own master," says Dawe, " he abandoned 
 all serious reading . . . perhaps never possessed a book in his life." . . . 
 "His parents had tried to frighten him in his youth by exaggerating the 
 dangers of vice. Later, he would frequent haunts of vice at all hours 
 of the night, without an associate, — he seemed to pride himself on doing 
 everything his parents represented as pernicious, and the more he could 
 throw off his juvenile fears, the more he thought himself a man. . . . 
 Though totally unfit to mingle in frays, he delighted to be a spectator 
 of them." 
 
 Very shortly after his emancipation from his father, he fell into 
 stricter bonds, those of an Irish dealer, unnamed. The pictures 
 painted for this man " [I quote from Dawe] " were begun while Morland 
 was in his father's house ; they were of a description that did little 
 credit either to the artist or his employer. . . . This person lived in 
 Drury Lane. He attended Morland every morning for three or four 
 hours to direct the manner of treating these pictures. . . . Morland's 
 connection with him began by his employing a friend to dispose of many 
 of his designs to him, without disclosing his name, and while this was the 
 case he was tolerably paid, — but no sooner did the purchaser become 
 
 1 "George Morland, Painter, London" (1895) ; f "George Morland's Pictures " (1897), 
 by Ralph Richardson, F.R.S.E., etc. London : Elliot Stock. 
 
SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE 
 
 13 
 
 acquainted with the artist, than, discovering his ignorance of the 
 world, he bargained for them at half the former price. Subsequently 
 Morland had a lodging taken for him at Martlett's Court, Bow Street, 
 and was kept there at work. . . . The magnitude of his labours did 
 not equal their depravity ; it is said that many of them were added 
 to the private collection made by the late Lord Grosvenor." 
 
 About this time he frequented the Cheshire Cheese in Russell 
 Court. " One night he left this place at ten, embarked on the 
 Gravesend Hoy, and reached that place at two the following morning. 
 Here he met a carpenter and sailor with whom he walked to Chatham, 
 five miles distant. The sailor and he then adjourned to a public- 
 house and drank purl" (a liquor composed of a pint of ale, a quarter 
 of a pint of milk, a wineglass of gin, rum, or brandy, and some sugar) 
 "till seven in the morning. After this they embarked in a small vessel 
 and sailed to the North Foreland, where they were nearly wrecked. 
 Morland got back safely to Chatham, and next day returned to 
 Gravesend with eighteenpence in his pocket, a sum sufficient to enable 
 him to return to London, and narrate his adventures to his comrades 
 at the Cheshire Cheese." (Richardson, pp. 20, 21.) 
 
 Not long after this he escaped from the Irish dealer, "for whom 
 he had painted enough pictures to fill a room ; the dealer charged 
 half-a-crown admission to this very early Morland Gallery." In 
 connection with Lord Grosvenor, Mr. Hassell remarks on his selection 
 of •* subjects not particularly distinguished for their chastity," and tries 
 to make out that Morland, in painting such subjects for his Lordship, 
 lost "the last remaining vestige of prudence," and was allured, "from 
 the sensual productions of his pencil, to pursue scenes of licentious 
 pleasure." Any one who knows anything about the difficulties of 
 technique which beset the painter, will see the folly of connecting that 
 arduous work, in whatever line it may be pursued, with any form of 
 continued debauchery. 
 
 Having shaken off the Irish dealer, or rather taken French leave of 
 him, Morland appears next at Margate, nominally staying with a Mrs. 
 Hill, a wealthy lady who introduced him to her friends, and through 
 whom he obtained many commissions for portraits. His actual life at 
 Margate was a strange one for an artist, consisting of riding (" I have 
 swum my horse in the sea several times"), a certain amount of fashionable 
 
14 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 life, not much to his taste apparently, horse-racing, which whether he 
 won or lost seems (that being apparently the fashion at country 
 meetings) to have let him in for some rough-and-tumble fighting in 
 which he bore his part gallantly enough, — and portrait painting. But 
 already (in his twenty-first year) the drink-demon was with him, for 
 Richardson, quoting Dawe, tells us that while painting the portrait of 
 Mr. Wedderburn, afterwards Lord Loughborough, "gin and purl 
 influenced the painter too much one day, and he ruined his lordship's 
 embroidered coat by allowing the melted tallow of a lighted candle to fall 
 upon it." However, he seems to have made a good deal of money by 
 portrait painting while at Margate, and to have worked hard, besides 
 charming everybody, aristocrats and commoners alike. For an instance, 
 while at Margate " he took a lodging in a house, part of which was 
 occupied by Mr. Sherborne, a brother of Lord Digby. Mr. Sherborne 
 having heard Morland play the violin, an instrument on which he also 
 performed, and liking his appearance, invited him to play violin duets 
 with him. . . . Mr. Sherborne not merely accompanied him on the 
 violin, but took drawing lessons from him, and ordered several 
 pictures." (Richardson, p. 25.) Mr. Sherborne, according to Dawe, 
 seems at different times and at later dates to have made efforts to 
 renew Morland's acquaintance, but the painter made no response to 
 his overtures. 
 
 The foregoing gives a not unpleasant picture of Morland's life till his 
 marriage with the sister of James Ward, the future R.A., and of William 
 Ward the engraver, to whom are due so many of the best reproductions 
 of Morland's work. The marriage took place in 1786, Morland's twenty- 
 third year ; and as an instance of his impishness, it is said he insisted on 
 being married with a brace of pistols in his belt. 
 
 Here too ends his glimpse of fashionable society. He settled with 
 his wife a few months after their marriage in Hampstead Road, Camden 
 Town. Collins says that when Morland and his wife were living in 
 Pleasant Place, Kentish Town, about a year after their marriage, Mrs. 
 Morland had a child, still-born. Till that event Morland seems to have 
 been a pattern husband ; after child-birth Mrs. Morland had a tedious 
 illness, and the doctor said she could never have another child. Morland 
 began to go out of evenings to the Britannia, the Mother Redcap tea- 
 gardens, and the Assembly rooms at Kentish Town — these places were 
 
SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE 
 
 15 
 
 now more pleasant than his house. Music, of which he was passionately 
 fond, was one of the attractions of these places. 
 
 "At this time," says Dawe, " one of Morland's favourite amusements 
 was riding on the box of the Hampstead, Highgate, or Barnet stage- 
 coaches. This was the beginning of his acquaintance with coachmen, 
 post-boys, and similar characters." This also was the beginning of what 
 was to be for the rest of his life his role as a painter — of the inevitable 
 degradation too which accompanied his work ; for he seems to have been 
 inordinately vain, as well as free-handed and jovial, and became virtually 
 a slave to instead of the master of the sort of life these companionships 
 involved ; the men drank with him and wheedled money from him, he 
 drank and became gradually weaker, being quite unfitted for a life which 
 may have been play to his boon-comrades, but was inevitably death to him. 
 
 "In 1788," says Blagdon, "he was elected a Fellow of the Incor- 
 porated Society of Artists : he never sent any picture himself to the 
 Royal Academy for exhibition . . . such as were sent there were sent 
 by proprietors, without Morland's knowledge or consent." 
 
 Dawe says, and Mr. Richardson confirms the anecdote, that Morland's 
 first attempt at children was the picture of children playing Blindman's 
 Buff. Mr. J. R. Smith was induced to buy it for twelve guineas, much 
 more than Morland expected. He and his boon-companion Brooks the 
 cobbler agreed, on receiving the cash, to drink each twelve glasses of 
 gin, and did it the instant the money was received. This picture of 
 Blindman s Buff is probably the one mentioned in Mr. Richardson's 
 catalogue of pictures by Morland (published 1897) as being in the 
 possession of Lieut.-Col. F. A. White, of Castor House, Northampton. 
 It is stated in the catalogue to have been engraved by Wm. Ward in 1788. 
 
 Another typical instance is related by Dawe of Morland's hunger for 
 money, and mad desire to throw it away. He had finished a picture one 
 afternoon (particulars of this painting will be given hereafter), and the 
 buyer, Colonel Stewart, gave him a cheque for forty guineas, twice as 
 much as a dealer would have given. Morland managed to cash the 
 cheque that same evening, and did not appear till late the next day, when 
 all or most of the money was spent. 
 
 While living at Paddington about 1 790, Dawe tells us, Morland kept 
 a menagerie of an old horse, an ass, foxes, goats, hogs, dogs of all 
 kinds, monkeys, squirrels, guinea-pigs, dormice, etc. He kept two 
 
i6 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 grooms and a footman, and an open table. The wine remained in open 
 hampers in the yard ; even his colours were used as much for pelting the 
 coachmen and others who passed, as for painting." At this time also 
 he took to owning horses, six or eight at a time. He bought them dear 
 and sold them cheap. He also took to hiring horses, and making 
 excursions, and once he was away for a week riding, and went to Whitby 
 in Yorkshire. 
 
 Once, while living in Camden Town, he took it into his head to serve 
 as a constable, gratis, for a neighbour. He did it very badly, but 
 managed in one case to turn it to professional advantage. Just as he 
 was about to begin his four pictures of the Deserter, '* a sergeant, a 
 drummer, and soldiers, on their way to Dover in pursuit of deserters, 
 came in for a billet. Morland accompanied them to the Britannia, and 
 treated them, questioning them on modes of recruiting, trial and punish- 
 ment of deserters. He took the soldiers to his house, and caroused 
 with them all night, employing himself busily in sketching and noting 
 whatever appeared likely to serve his purpose ; and during the whole 
 of the next day he detained them in his painting room, and availed 
 himself of every advantage the occasion afforded." (Probably the 
 picture mentioned later, called The Deserters Farewell, now in Sir 
 Walter Gilbey's possession, is due to this incident.) 
 
 Morland's " reluctance to mix with genteel society, on account of the 
 restraints which it imposed on him, induced him to prefer working for 
 those only who were his intimates, and with whom he could act as he 
 pleased. By such conduct he became surrounded by a set of men who 
 cut off all intercourse between him and his real admirers ; the consequence 
 was that the latter could procure none of his performances but through 
 their medium, and at length ceased to apply to him." The reason he 
 assigned for disliking to work for gentlemen was his not choosing to 
 accommodate himself to the whims of his employers. 
 
 In 1 79 1 an arrangement was made to pay off his debts (which 
 amounted to ^^2000 according to Blagdon, nearly ^4000 according to 
 Dawe) ; rooms were taken for him, and the rent guaranteed by his two 
 principal creditors, in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. This arrange- 
 ment was made with a view of inducing Morland to paint so many hours 
 a day, and frequent the society of eminent artists ; his answer to these 
 suggestions was, " I would rather go to Newgate, by God ! " However, 
 
SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE 
 
 17 
 
 he agreed to pay £120 a month, but appears to have adhered to 
 this arrangement for a short time only, and to have been very casual 
 about both his work and his payments ; still, according to Richardson, 
 he managed to clear off about ten shillings in the pound after 
 some time. 
 
 Hassell tells us that " from too great an eagerness to touch the ready 
 rhino Morland has been repeatedly over-reached ; by the judicious 
 display of a few guineas this artist has been induced to part with a 
 picture to-day which to-morrow perhaps would have brought him double 
 the sum. The proffer of money was, in fact, a temptation he could not 
 resist, and his wily visitors, aware of this, were ever ready to hold out the 
 seducing bait. It is, however, but just to observe that notwithstanding 
 all their cunning, the biters themselves were sometimes bit, the artist 
 having been known occasionally to employ art against art, and thus to 
 outwit those cautious dealers in their own way. In the course of the 
 years 1790, 1791, and 1792 (the last in particular), when his best pictures 
 were produced, a host of admiring dealers were complaisant enough to 
 offer him any pecuniary assistance he might deem it expedient to accept. 
 Morland, who had a wonderful alacrity in borrowing, without scruple or 
 hesitation, embraced the offer indiscriminately, for there was scarcely one 
 of these liberal friends whose purse he did not make free with, and that 
 too almost at the same time and upon the same occasion." Hassell 
 indicates further on that Morland having made a purse for himself in this 
 way, went to Leicestershire and stayed with Mr. Claude Lorraine (or 
 Loraine) Smith, under whose auspices he painted many country subjects ; 
 that the dealers, who in advancing him money had hoped to make a 
 good thing out of the pictures he could paint, found themselves out- 
 witted, since his ; departure for Leicester was kept profoundly secret; 
 and that Morland himself gained fresh experience and new material by 
 this very dubious line of conduct on his part. At the end of his 
 stay in Paddington, in 1791 probably, an incident happened which 
 showed how utterly reckless he was in regard to other people's money, 
 when he himself was hard up. A bun baker, says Mr. Richardson, 
 "ambitious to place his son in Government service, sent the young 
 man with a large sum to purchase an appointment, as the manner then 
 was. The youth was unable to effect a purchase, and visited sundry 
 
 alehouses on his way home. He likewise honoured Morland with a 
 
 c 
 
i8 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 visit, and found him painting a fine landscape, which the budding 
 Government functionary greatly admired. Morland, always hard up, 
 appreciated the visit all the more that the youth showed him the large 
 sum in his possession ; so he induced the latter, after more wine, to lend 
 him this sum on his giving him a written promise of the picture when 
 finished, as a cover for the accommodation. The young man gave 
 Morland the money, and went home so intoxicated that it was only next 
 morning that he could explain to his father what had become of the cash. 
 The bun baker was furious, and the production of Morland's written 
 promise by no means assuaged his wrath. He endeavoured to find the 
 painter, but the latter had disappeared, and when he was found, all the 
 money was spent." (Richardson, p. 58.) 
 
 Blagdon says that when in the King's Bench for debt the Marshal of 
 the prison favoured Morland with the rules. Debtors who obtain this 
 privilege are supposed to break the rules if they enter any public-house 
 or licensed place. ... " The Marshal employed Morland to paint some 
 pictures. . . . One day he observed Morland in a public-house, on 
 which ... he threatened to re-commit him to prison. The same day 
 Morland painted a view of the tap-room, with portraits of the persons 
 who were in his company. Among the rest, the Marshal was seen 
 leaning in at the window, in the act of taking a glass of gin from the 
 artist. 
 
 " Inebriety by no means diminished his talent, for when in the 
 humour he could work as well drunk as sober. He has been known, after 
 spending the evening in dissipation, to return home at 2 a.m., take a large 
 canvas, and paint more than a mere sketch, e.g., a farmyard littered 
 with straw, a calf and a sow. . . . The sketch was sold next day 
 . . . for ten guineas." 
 
 " He has been known to set off in the night and ride some miles to 
 attend a feast of gipsies in a wood, in order to observe the effect of 
 firelight and the characters of these people." 
 
 These extracts from the biographies by Blagdon, Collins, Dawe, and 
 Hassell serve to show Morland as he personally seemed to his contem- 
 poraries and friends ; their judgment of him as an artist will be treated 
 later: but a final point should be cleared up with regard to Morland 
 himself and his married life. That he was in the last eight or ten 
 years of his life a hopeless sot there is no denying. That he ever 
 
George Morland. From a sketch in water colours by T. Roivlandson, British Museum. 
 
SOME NOTES ON HIS LIFE 
 
 19 
 
 behaved brutally to his wife there is no evidence whatever, any more 
 than that he wilfully or cruelly neglected her. That he was no sloven in 
 painting, whatever he may have been in his personal life, is sufficiently 
 proved by the testimony of his four biographers and of James Ward, to 
 say nothing of the silent witness of the numerous engravings after his 
 pictures. Very few artists have worked harder than he ; painting, as 
 Ward implies, must have been the breath of life to him. As to brutal 
 conduct towards, and neglect of, his wife, we cannot do better than take 
 Ward's not too friendly estimate — Ward, his own wife's brother : " Let it 
 be clearly understood," he says, " there never was a separation between 
 Morland and his wife, beyond his own removals from her, and those 
 longer or shorter according to his own irregular temper," separations 
 explained further by the four biographers and by Ward himself as very 
 frequently caused by the necessity of avoiding his creditors. And Ward 
 adds, to show Mrs. Morland's love for her husband, that " she used to 
 say, ' Ah ! my friends think it would be a relief to me if George were to 
 die ; but they do not know what they say ; for whenever that takes place 
 I shall not live three days,' which turned out to be the fact." 
 
 George Morland died in a spunging-house in Eyre St. Hill, penniless,, 
 on October 29, 1804 i his wife died four days after. 
 
II 
 
 MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 From Morland to Millet and Bastien Lepage — Notes on Morland's methods of work, and 
 his contemporaries' opinion — Evolution from him through Millet and Lepage to some 
 later English painters. 
 
 Morland's life then from his twenty-first birthday to his death, a period 
 of twenty years, was a long record of feverish vitality — the joie de vivre 
 spurred to racing pace — gradually ebbing to premature decay ; and through 
 it all a great soul shining and energizing, a painter's soul, harried and 
 devitalized from day to day by the monstrous demands upon it made by 
 his physical unrest. 
 
 In his story Le Chef-cVceuvre inconnu Balzac puts into the mouth of 
 the Flemish painter Porbus (whose later years were spent at Paris) the 
 following anecdote : — A certain artist (called in the story Frenhofer) had 
 sacrificed a large part of his possessions to satisfy the passions of Mabuse : 
 in exchange, Mabuse had given to this artist the secret of " relief," the 
 power to give to his figures that extraordinary life, that flower of nature, 
 which is an eternal despair, but the technique of which Mabuse was so 
 well possessed of that one day having sold (and drunk the proceeds of) 
 the flowered damask robe which he should have worn at the entry of 
 Charles V., he accompanied his master (the bastard of Burgundy) in 
 a paper robe which he had painted to resemble damask. The peculiar 
 lustre of the stuff (the mock damask) worn by Mabuse attracted the 
 notice of the Emperor, who, wishing to compliment the old drunkard's 
 protector on his follower's brave appearance, discovered the trick. Is 
 there not a strange parallel between this story and the life of Morland ? 
 Mabuse painted for the great ones of the earth, it is true, and for the 
 Catholic Church, that first great picture dealer — Morland painted for a 
 
 20 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 21 
 
 few gentlemen of England, and for a great many picture dealers of quite 
 other nature than the princes of the Church : M abuse sold his rich mantle 
 for drink, and by his skill produced a paper counterfeit ; did not Morland 
 pawn his soul, and prostitute his art, for no better a prize and with no 
 worthier an aim ? 
 
 In another story of Balzac's, La Cousine Bette, the Mar^chal-Prince 
 de Wissembourg says to Baron Hulot, after the latter's detection in 
 embezzling from the State, "You should have quitted office from the 
 moment that you had become no longer a man, but a temperament." 
 The idea arising from these words confronts us as we go through the 
 disastrous record of George Morland's personal life. His most coherent 
 biographer, George Dawe, R.A., says, amidst a drone of commonplace, 
 almost echoing Balzac, "It has been observed of Gray, the poet, that 
 he never was a child ; it may with equal truth be asserted of Morland 
 that he never was a man." 
 
 This being so, if we look at the work of his maturity only, say from 
 1787 to 1797, a period which comprises the largest number of his really 
 fine works, we of to-day have before us the question of how to place him 
 as a painter — in what class of men who have been painters : whether as 
 an English painter he shall stand side by side with Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
 Gainsborough, Hoppner, and Romney, or whether, saying Art has no 
 country, we are to put him in brotherhood with the two Teniers, the 
 two Ostades, and Cuyp, or even, looking at his earlier work, assign him 
 a temporary place in company with Watteau and later French painters, 
 a connection on which I shall touch presently. The fact is that in a sense 
 he is ddclassd — a case of splendid isolation ; no tradition backed him up, 
 the helping hands of contemporaries he refused, either because of the 
 inborn devil of waywardness, or because of the false position into which 
 his good birth yoked to straitened circumstances forced him from the 
 beginning. I say splendid isolation advisedly : for though in the life he 
 chose in his best years pictorially to represent, that of open-air folk, men, 
 women and children, homely forms of animal life, and hunting and 
 shooting scenes, a score of masters past and present have achieved great 
 things, not one of these like Morland has so absolutely and without any 
 sort of compromise worked out such salvation as a whole life could give 
 him, unaided by some sort of comradeship with either the work of the 
 dead or the mind and hand of the living. 
 
22 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 The Dutch painters, Rembrandt, Franz Hals, Gerard Dow, Paul 
 Potter, Cuyp, Berghem, the two Ostades, Ruysdael, de Hooch, Adrian 
 van der Velde, Hobbema (many among whom Morland is said to have 
 studied), each began where one or another of them was beginning to 
 leave off: each indeed jostles another in the race; Franz Hals, the first 
 great Dutchman, and Rembrandt his contemporary bar twenty years, 
 had the Flemish men, Rubens, Snyders and the two Teniers but little 
 ahead of them, and even for a time abreast, in point of date ; and these 
 last had the tradition of Jan van Eyck, Memlinc, Matsys and Mabuse 
 to enlighten them. The consequence was a vast and varied collection 
 of works painted in love, conceived at least in spiritual comradeship : 
 and the result has been that in the finest of the Dutchmen who painted 
 outdoor life, tavern life, animal life, seafaring life, there is no impatience, 
 no apparent necessity to fill so many canvases, as Morland in his latter 
 years was forced to do, but work wrought to the uttermost without toil, 
 with no sense of labour, a complete gift of mind and hand. 
 
 Of this array of heroes all might have been, and most it appears were, 
 through their works, accessible to Morland ; we have already seen 
 mentioned as studied by him not only the brothers Ostade, but Ruysdael 
 and Hobbema, from whose works he is said to have made copies under 
 circumstances already specified. We have also seen how he studied 
 and admired Gainsborough's work in animal painting and landscape. 
 
 Of Gainsborough's work of this kind I shall speak later, in connection 
 with the subject of Morland's painting ; but this seems a fitting place 
 to describe two pictures, one by Adrian van Ostade, and one by the 
 younger Teniers, because they are typical instances of many other works 
 by Dutch and Flemish masters in which, as in themselves, a certain 
 parentage to Morland's work is observable. It is impossible to look 
 at Adrian van Ostade's picture at the National Gallery called The 
 Alchemist without acknowledging the influence such work must have had 
 on Morland, whether he saw original paintings by or engravings from 
 that master and others of his school. The picture in question is a 
 marvellous example of the atmosphere de tableau: a burly middle-aged 
 man in an old felt wideawake hat, sleeves of a dusty red, black vest, 
 dark blue-grey breeks and gaiters, and a black jean or leather apron, is 
 blowing up his forge ; there is a crucible in a red earthen pot, a big 
 old book cast on the floor, one leaf lying loose, a stool with a clay pipe 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 23 
 
 on it. Everything takes its place, but is also a wonder of finish. The 
 whole picture gives you a large feeling of space and tone. And there 
 is no bogeydom, no straining after weirdness ; the whole is a common 
 workshop, the scene of the man's daily life : he feeds well, one is sure — 
 if he has dreams his face does not betray them, it is just the face of 
 a born craftsman. In the distance lighted by a far window, sits an 
 old woman, possibly cutting up a cabbage : bar her homeliness she might 
 be Madame Claes, the keeper of the Alchemist's commercial conscience. 
 Morland never achieved such delicacy united to breadth, such finish 
 combined with harmony of effect, though before he took the wrong turn 
 he came near achieving it. 
 
 The younger Teniers in his picture called Tric-trac gives another 
 example not only of the works that Morland loved, but of the life (alas !) 
 he best loved too. In one respect it at once takes rank above the 
 English painter, for every man must be a portrait ; the two playing 
 might indeed be English as well as Dutch, the man looking on is a 
 degraded boor. In the chimney place (right of the picture) are several 
 men further off, one with his back to you is seated on a bench with his 
 head against the chimney jamb : a " poor drinker " he seems. The 
 sturdier man, standing with his back to the fire, smoking a long clay, 
 looks half-pitying, half-scornful at the feebler sinner. It is all very much 
 of a piece with the life Morland lived, and rendered in masterly fashion 
 by a man who very likely lived a similar life, but with a bigger brain and 
 a stronger nerve-system ; for Teniers the younger lived till eighty, and 
 so had time to become respectable, and in his painting dull (a fate spared 
 to Morland), witness the former's picture of the Chateau de Perck, 
 himself and his family and their chateau, in the National Gallery. 
 
 In the earlier years of his manhood Morland is said (though I do not 
 find it insisted on in any of his biographies) to have come under the 
 influence of Watteau and other later French painters to a certain extent. 
 His French descent on his mother's side may, as suggested presently, give 
 colour to this idea ; and undoubted evidence of it is to be found in two 
 such pictures as IndtLstry and Idleness, at Sir Charles Tennant's, in the 
 picture Louisa, at Mr. Harland Peck's, in The Disconsolate, at Canon 
 Phillips's (all of which pictures are described hereafter), in the Lcetitia 
 series, and in four pictures belonging to Mr. Barratt, called Belinda, 
 The Pledge of Love, Caroline of Lichtfeld, and Constancy, besides several 
 
24 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 others of the same period. There can be no doubt about the charm of 
 handling, the free and certain touch, in these pictures, as well as in the girl 
 in the painting called Valentines Day, also later described. But Morland 
 does not in these works give us the intimate charm of Watteau ; we do 
 not find in them, as we do in Watteau's masterpieces, a world of their 
 own, of brocades and high heels, silk breeches and buckled shoes — a 
 world of folk living an artificial, impossible, but gracious life amid Corot- 
 like landscapes, a life of the delicate high breeding of the ancien regime 
 mingled with the freedom of the coulisses. These girls of Morland's, 
 with all their grace, have little or no magic or illusion about them as 
 Watteau's people have ; they are^ simply dressed (and prettily) in muslin 
 or cotton, the colour also is true and delicate, but not rich or superb, 
 elaborate or varied ; and although the pictures aim at some incident as 
 shown by their titles, we look no further than the painting, we are not 
 taken into any world of fancy or story. Besides, while Watteau treated 
 the artificial in a masterly fashion de parti pris, Morland seemed to aim 
 always at naturalness and simplicity in this as in his later manner, 
 though without always arriving in this earlier work at mastery of 
 expression. When all is said, though Morland's French blood sufficiently 
 accounts for any sympathy he may have had in early manhood with the 
 great French master's work, and for a certain gracious sense of line and 
 beauty strongly allied to the best Art flourishing in France from the end 
 of the seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution, the true genius 
 of Morland was yet to seek in these early paintings of his. He only 
 became really himself, aesthetically, when he began to live among and 
 paint the peasants and gipsies of the country of his birth. It is true 
 that in a measure exception must be made to the foregoing observations 
 when one thinks of the two remarkable works later described, called Boys 
 Robbing an Orchard, and Children playing at Soldiers. But of paintings 
 by Morland so fine as these two, in this genre, there are very few examples, 
 if any ; and it is doubtful if any at all of this kind were executed after 
 his twenty-fifth year ; so that we may fairly assume, after making every 
 allowance for circumstances, that the work of his later years was the 
 work of his heart. 
 
 Dawe says he made many copies of Gainsborough's celebrated picture 
 of pigs, and a sketch from his fighting dogs from which he afterwards 
 painted several pictures. And Sir Joshua's work- must have had an 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 25 
 
 unconscious if fleeting influence on him. But Gainsborough, it must be 
 remembered, was, in the line which Morland made his own, rather a pre- 
 decessor than a contemporary : for long before Morland began to paint, 
 Gainsborough had ceased to paint anything but portraits. While allowing 
 Morland full credit for his originality, and for that position as a pioneer 
 which I began by claiming for him, the mere existence of Gainsborough's 
 splendid landscape and animal work must be taken into account as an 
 influence in the forming of Morland's maturer style ; for it is impossible 
 to doubt his having seen, as well as the others specified by his biographers, 
 such works as some of those now in the National Gallery ; while the 
 pictures by Gainsborough at Sir Charles Tennant's and Mr. Harland 
 Peck's (afterwards described) are masterpieces too great to be ignored 
 in discussing Morland's best work, whether the latter ever saw them or 
 not. Still, the incontrovertible fact remains that in the six years from 
 1784, the date of Morland's majority, till 1793, he worked to such 
 purpose that in 1790 or 1791 he was able to produce that masterpiece 
 The Inside of a Stable (National Gallery) from which, as from a centre 
 sun, all his previous and subsequent work may be said to be only more 
 or less a radiation. 
 
 There can be little doubt that the romance, and what I have called 
 the monstrous degradation, of his years of manhood, combined with his 
 almost preterhuman working and inventive powers, have caused an 
 interest in his works which a vast majority of them could not possess, 
 had they no historical ear-mark, no story or possible bit of biography 
 attached to them. His output is figured at four thousand pictures, an 
 average of two hundred a year for twenty years, or four a week. Given 
 every abnormal stimulus of vanity, drink, necessity, or even the mania 
 for painting, it is evident that this represents an impossible number in 
 the time, if we are to count each work as a picture. When we add to 
 these the number of forgeries and copies explicitly stated to exist, or to 
 have existed in all writings concerning Morland, we get a mass of work 
 which has caused a long-established consensus of talk and opinion tending 
 to keep his name in the public mind, and emanating from two deeply 
 interested classes, owners and picture dealers, such as few craftsmen, how- 
 ever prolific, can command. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that 
 Morland is one of the few painters in regard to whose works little or no 
 fluctuation in opinion, certainly no decrease in commercial value, has 
 
26 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 occurred. It would be rash to say that his fame and the price of his 
 pictures have reached their zenith even yet ; it is probable that perhaps 
 a hundred of his best works will continue to hold their own even against 
 the gradually swelling tide of talent which exists throughout Europe to-day 
 in the works of men whose sympathies are enlisted for the subjects which 
 Morland loved best to paint. For Morland, like a few living men who 
 work on his lines, though not with his drawbacks, was a painter de race ; 
 the phrase is not mine, but a lately uttered speech by a poetical painter 
 with a future still before him, a painter whose achievements will be made 
 in a field as far apart from that of Morland as is Fontainebleau or 
 Sherwood from a Dorsetshire midden. Morland, I repeat, is a painter 
 de race, from the fact of birth, having a father and mother and grand- 
 father painters also, as well as in the sense that we must also call 
 Reynolds, Gainsborough and Hoppner equally painters de race, though 
 none of them so far as I know had any painter's or artist's blood in their 
 veins. In finding a niche for him however, in fixing his place in the 
 scheme of evolution as applied to painting, it seems quite natural if not 
 necessary to class him, in one respect at least, by the range of his 
 subjects. This, no doubt, at the present time confronts us with a difficulty, 
 seeing that it is a fashion cried upon the housetops to say, now-a-days, 
 that what a man paints is no matter, and how he paints it is everything. 
 
 Be that as it may, seeing that in the matter of subjects treated I wish 
 to touch on a certain connection between Morland and Jean Francois 
 Millet and later in date with Bastien Lepage, let me here quote Mr. 
 Walter Sickert's summary of Millet and his work,^ and some remarks 
 from Mr. Clausen's essay on Lepage,^ with this introductory word ; all 
 or nearly all Morland's works are restful or lazy in subject; most of 
 Millet's and Lepage's, if not all, are full of toil or the sense of toil past 
 and inevitably to come. Mr. Sickert's words about Millet might be 
 used midato no77ime about Morland ; Mr. Clausen on Lepage suggests 
 striking parallelisms between, and divergences from him and Morland. 
 
 "The important fact about Millet," says Mr. Sickert, "is not that he 
 struggled with poverty, which we now know was not the dominant 
 personal note in Millet's life, or that he expressed on canvas the dignity 
 of labour, but that he was a great artist. As corollaries, he was a great 
 draughtsman and a great colourist. He was gifted with the compre- 
 ^ "Jules Bastien Lepage and his Art." London : Fisher Unwin. 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 27 
 
 hension in its entirety of the import of any scene in nature which he 
 wished to render. An unerring analysis enabled him to select what were 
 the vital constituents of such a scene, and exquisite perceptions, trained 
 by incessant labour, enabled him to render them in fitting terms in 
 accordance with the traditions which govern the use of such materials. 
 
 " Millet, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, had seen his picture 
 happen somewhere in Nature. Its treatment generally involved complex 
 difficulties of suggestion of movement, or at least of energy, to say nothing 
 of those created by the variety of lighting and atmospheric effect ; the 
 management of sunlight, of twilight, of the lighting of interiors. All these 
 elements he was enabled by means of a highly-trained artistic memory, to 
 retain and render in the summary method which we call inspiration, and 
 which has nothing in common with the piecemeal and futile copying of 
 nature of a later school. Dealing with materials in their essential nature 
 living and fleeting, his execution was in the main separated from his observa- 
 tion. H is observation was thus uninterrupted by the exigencies of execution, 
 and his execution untrammelled by the fortuitous inconveniences incident on 
 the moment of observation, and undisturbed moreover by the kaleidoscopic 
 shifting of the pictorial elements which bewilder or mislead the mere 
 plein-airiste. He did not say to the woman at the wash-tub * Do as if you 
 were washing, and stay like that for me four or five hours a day, while I 
 paint a picture from you,' or to the reaper ' Stay like that with the scythe 
 drawn back, pretending to reap.' ' La nature ne pose pas ' to quote his own 
 WOrd§. He knew that if figures in movement were to be painted so as to 
 be convincing, it must be by a process of cumulative observation. . . . 
 Millet observed and observed again, making little in the way of studies on 
 the spot, a note sometimes of movement on a cigarette paper. And when 
 he held his picture " [held it in his mind] " he knew it, and the execution 
 was the singing of a song learned by heart and not the painful performance 
 in public of a meritorious feat of sight-reading. . . . Let it also be noted 
 that the work of Millet was, with scarcely an exception, free from pre- 
 occupation with the walls of an exhibition. The scale of his pictures 
 and their key were dictated by the artistic requirements of the subject, 
 and not by the necessities or allurements of . . . competitive painting." 
 
 The whole of this last foregoing rdsimtd of Millet's qualities is worth 
 quoting for itself I annex it here because, as above said, it may with no 
 forcing be applied to Morland, allowance always made for era, tempera- 
 
28 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 ment and circumstances. Morland too made few studies, held his picture 
 in his mind when he knew it, had when at his best a supreme power 
 of observation, exquisite perception and an executive gift trained by years 
 of hard study ; and Morland too never painted " competitively " for 
 exhibition. 
 
 Mr. Clausen says of Lepage certain things that differentiate him from, 
 and one thing that allies him to, Morland. The latter is that " as far as 
 IS possible for an artist now-a-days he appears to have been uninfluenced 
 by the old masters. The only lesson he seems to have learnt from them 
 was that nature, which sufficed for them, should suffice for him also." 
 What differentiates him from Morland is that " all that side of nature which 
 depends on memory for its realization was left almost untouched by 
 him ... it may be said that he sought elaboration of detail perhaps at 
 the expense of effect, approaching nature at times too much from the 
 point of view of still life. . . . Lepage, it may be said, has carried literal 
 representation to its extreme limit; so much so as to leave clearly 
 discernible to us the question which was doubtless before him . . . 
 whether it is possible to attain literal truth without leaving on one side 
 much of that which is most beautiful in nature ? And further, the 
 question arises whether literal truth is the highest truth. For realism as 
 an end in art leads nowhere: it is an impasse. Surely it is but the 
 means to whatever the artist has it in him to express. I feel convinced 
 that realism was not the end with Bastien Lepage." 
 
 In all the foregoing it is very clear that up to the point at which 
 Lepage left off working his whole soul bent itself to a task which Morland 
 had never attempted to tackle ; that Lepage, who died at 36, ended with 
 his life an apprenticeship only, as Morland ended his at 21 : Lepage's 
 apprenticeship would have left him ready for the wider field in which 
 Millet worked, in which after his manner Morland had worked before— 
 and in that field both painters might have stood shoulder to shoulder 
 with Millet. But while Morland's apprenticeship was the task-work of a 
 boy, Lepage's was the self-imposed work of a man, who indeed gave us a 
 master's achievements in such subjects as The Beggar, The Communicant, 
 The Hayfield, and The Woodman. Morland plunged straightway or 
 nearly so into work which led him to achievements between the ages 
 of 28 and 35 such as The Inside of a Stable, Horses in a Stable, The 
 Deserters Farewell, Gipsies, The Dram, The TiLrnpike Gate, and others 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 29 
 
 mentioned later, works which may stand on the ground of technique and 
 purely painting quality, apart from subject and feeling, with Millet's and 
 Lepage's finest masterpieces and even those of Degas, who is in this 
 respect like Morland, that he has never worked as did Lepage in an 
 endeavour to realize the small and fine though superfluous details of 
 nature, but has expressed, as did Millet, only the most essential truths. 
 
 The fact is that subject and method interlace, and that a picture may be 
 " literary " — as telling a story — and yet be a masterpiece, while another 
 may be an attempt to render tone, colour, light and shade and values, and 
 yet be a daub : also, that given right conditions of the method, the picture 
 with human or animate incident finely done is a bigger achievement than 
 a picture without that interest, such as one of still life. Landscape, sky 
 and sea are so indissolubly bound up with human interest and passion 
 that they naturally fall under the category of pictures with animate 
 incident. In such a conjuncture as this elemental battle between style and 
 method on one side, and subject on the other, there will never be a last- 
 ing peace, hardly will there be a truce : for Mr. Sickert, when in the essay 
 on Millet above quoted he falls to denigration of Lepage as a Salonnier, a 
 falsely called realist who is no realist, but a man who insists on the needless 
 to the detriment of the essential — and Mr. Clausen in his more balanced 
 attitude towards Lepage as working his way through minute observation 
 to larger truths — while they seem to represent or lead opposite forces of 
 skirmishers, are really in all main essentials on the same side ; they fight 
 against the Philistine who encourages slight or sloven work — against mere 
 respectability in achievement, against prettiness, against the "pleasing," 
 in short against all that makes for the art of the villa, and stifles or 
 atrophies invention and the search for fresh truths. The art of the villa, 
 the taste of the suburban, always tends towards a story ; it likes and 
 produces pleasing incident : and as these things are more commonly met 
 with in so-called painters, and are vastly more popular among the average 
 middle-classes, than the qualities of handling, values, sense of colour, and 
 fine drawing, they will always be largely supplied, and form a respectable 
 mercenary host to array against the true fighters for freedom's sake and 
 for the perfect truth's sake. Of this perfect truth in many inspired 
 moments Morland had full cognizance ; often when he painted she was 
 there, though often she left too slight a mark of her presence. But in 
 his most fugitive efforts he is a standing martyr to the fact that genius 
 
30 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 fettered by vices comes nearer God than hide-bound and blameless 
 industry with free hands and no daemon to guide them but its own 
 self-sufficiency. 
 
 And yet Morland's work, in its extraordinary popularity almost 
 gives the lie to the ideas I have been dealing with. He, whom no self- 
 respecting woman of to-day would be seen in the same room with, often 
 found himself through his pictures in the most artless and conventional 
 company, some of which would have bored him to extinction, some which 
 would have flattered his vanity, some which he would have cut dead. It 
 is unfortunate that we must at times mishandle Shakespeare, but here one 
 must needs use the phrase " one touch of nature " out of its context. The 
 touch of nature in Morland is what brings us all under his spell : in this 
 case it is not " new-born gauds " that we praise, but the homeliness of the 
 homeliest of nations as seen in peasants and sailors, gipsies, horses, asses 
 and dogs, as seen in the grey of her skies, the friendly look of her lanes 
 and cottages, the savage grandeur and pitilessness of her coasts. 
 
 As a pioneer or forerunner then, Morland should take hands with 
 Millet rather than with Lepage, though it is conceivable, seeing his study 
 of Ostade, that he would have appreciated to the full Lepage's work. But 
 Morland was no plein-airiste, though it is said he recommended students 
 to set up their easels in a field and paint a tree as they saw it. So far as 
 we are told, his own practice was widely different, and resembled rather the 
 manner of Millet as described by Mr. Sickert. Indeed I am convinced of 
 this by having seen the sketches (described elsewhere in this essay), at 
 the British Museum Print Room, and in Sir Charles Hamilton's pos- 
 session, and also by the following facts taken from Mr. Richardson's 
 Life, or rather through him from Mr. Dawe ; they relate mainly to 
 his painting between 1790 and 1793 both inclusive. He seems during 
 these years to have made frequent excursions from Charlotte Street, 
 Fitzroy Square, having during 1790 or 1791 spent a long time in 
 Leicestershire. Throughout this country life, " his chief amusements 
 were," says Mr. Dawe, " to mix with the peasants of the places 
 where he made any stay, and to visit their cottages and play with 
 their children, to whom he often gave money : thus he procured frequent 
 opportunities for observing their manners, and occasionally assisted his 
 memory by making slight sketches of their attitudes, dresses, furniture, 
 and whatever seemed likely to be useful in his art." " He would," says 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 31 
 
 Mr. Richardson, "join parties of sportsmen, not merely for the sport, but 
 to create those sporting pictures which were afterwards engraved for the 
 English and French markets." 
 
 When he went to the sea-coast, fishermen, sailors and smugglers 
 came under his ever watchful eye, just as the peasants had done before. 
 Or he would join a gipsy encampment, and paint those inimitable gipsy 
 pictures which are now so prized. Blagdon tells the following story of 
 one of Morland's outings of this kind. A gipsy woman, whom an artist 
 was once sketching in a country churchyard, asked him if he knew one 
 George Morland. " Lord love him," she exclaimed, " I wish I could find 
 him out. He lived with us three days last summer upon Harrow Hill 
 and drawed the picture of a child of mine that's since dead. And now the 
 gentleman who begot the child would give twenty guineas for the picture ! " 
 " Whatever might be his situation," says Dawe, " whether he was riding 
 on horseback or in a stage coach, or surrounded by vulgar companions, his 
 mind was seldom wholly inattentive, though it displayed at the time nothing 
 but an eagerness to partake of the amusement that was passing, in which 
 he appeared to be as deeply engaged as any of the company ; for he never 
 mentioned to others the result of his serious and useful reflections. Pos- 
 sessed of much strength of observation, and active in the exercise of it, 
 among every description of company he derived some advantage. In 
 short, he seemed averse to seek knowledge in any other academy than 
 that of nature." And in this connection we may quote Dawe again, this 
 time on Morland's way of painting children. " When painting his juvenile 
 subjects he would invite the children of the neighbourhood to play about 
 in his room, and make sketches of them whenever any interesting situa- 
 tions occurred ; justly observing that to take them thus, in their uncon- 
 scious moments, is the best mode of studying their peculiar attitudes, and 
 to catch a thousand various graces of which it is impossible to conceive a 
 perfect idea in any other way. Grown persons may be placed in appro- 
 priate postures, but with children this is not practicable." 
 
 At a later date, it is true, but still bearing out the principle of 
 work, we find Morland in 1799, with his wife, in the Isle of Wight. 
 Dawe objects to his keeping " the apartment in which he painted filled 
 from morning till night with sailors, fishermen and smugglers." But as 
 Mr. Richardson pertinently observes, " he only followed the dictates of his 
 own style of art in collecting these men." A little further on, an anecdote 
 
32 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 is quoted by Mr. Richardson, from the early biographies which will serve 
 for a type of Morland's method of work at all times of his career. " A 
 friend once found Morland at Freshwater Gate, in a low public-house 
 called The Cabin. Sailors, rustics, and fishermen were seated round him 
 in a kind of ring, the roof tree rung with laughter and song, and Morland 
 with manifest reluctance left their company for the conversation of his 
 friend. * George,' said his monitor, ' you must have reasons for keeping 
 such company ! ' * Reasons and good ones,' said the artist laughing : 
 ' see, where could I find such a picture as that unless among the originals 
 of The Cabin ? ' He held up his sketch-book and showed a correct 
 delineation of the very scene in which he had so lately been the presiding 
 spirit. One of his best pictures contains this facsimile of the tap room, 
 with its guests and furniture." 
 
 All this shows that under whatever drawbacks caused by his natural 
 freedom of comradeship and love of drink, Morland pursued the true 
 course of getting by keen observation, retentive memory, skilled hand, and 
 rapid drawings of movement, the essential truths of the life he desired to 
 paint. The essential truths and no more. In this it is proved by the 
 foregoing anecdotes that he was an unconscious forerunner in the roads 
 afterwards beaten out by Millet and Degas. 
 
 Here follow some further notes on Morland's art and methods as 
 observed by his contemporaries. 
 
 "When surrounded," says Dawe, " by companions that would have 
 entirely impeded the progress of other men, he . . . would get one to 
 sit for a hand, another for a head, an attitude, a figure ... or to put on 
 any dress he wanted to copy ... his wife and sisters were almost his 
 only female models. ... He copied as much as possible immediately 
 from nature. . . . If he wished to introduce a red cloak or any other 
 garment of that sort, he would place a person at the window to watch till 
 some one passed likely to suit his purpose, on which he sent for the 
 passenger to come in, while he made a sketch and mixed his tints, and 
 seldom failed to reward the person liberally. What he could not copy 
 from nature was supplied by a retentive memory and acute observation." 
 
 Probably about 1788 "he put into practice the project of changing his 
 style. When asked if he did not think the correct manner of his early 
 studies extremely improving, he would laughingly ask, 'What, making 
 leaves like silver pennies ?' . . . The time at which he first came into 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 33 
 
 notice was particularly favourable ; the nation was at peace, a taste for 
 the arts was becoming general . . . Morland had no competitor in his own 
 line ... his style was original. 
 
 "The demand for his prints was so great in France that they were 
 frequently re-engraved there, and he received from that country advan- 
 tageous proposals either to go there to paint or to send over his pictures. 
 To these he paid no attention, for his reputation was established and he 
 had henceforward more employment in England than he was inclined to 
 execute." This would be during the years 1789-96 or 7. 
 
 " One of his first productions in rural subjects was a large picture of 
 gipsies kindling a fire, painted for Colonel Stewart for forty guineas, twice 
 as much as the dealers gave. A circumstance concerning this picture will 
 show with what rapidity he painted, and that he sometimes sacrificed his 
 original conception to dispatch. Colonel Stewart called one morning to see 
 how the picture was progressing, and asked when it would be finished. 
 Morland said by four o'clock. Colonel Stewart expressed his doubts, 
 declared to his companion his admiration of the work, adding that he did 
 not conceive it possible to finish it in so short a time, said he would call at 
 the appointed hour, and took his leave. . . . Morland obliterated several 
 figures he had sketched, in their place introduced one in a carter's frock, 
 and threw in masses of shade and foliage. By three o'clock the task was 
 complete, and Morland passed an hour playing shuttlecock. Colonel 
 Stewart arrived between four and five, and expressed his surprise at 
 the speed with which Morland had finished the picture. 
 
 " He was by no means addicted to self-commendation or to censuring 
 the works of other artists. But sometimes, on hearing Loutherbourg's 
 pictures preferred to his, he would compare them to teabbard painting, 
 assert that the characters were unlike nature, and challenge competition 
 with him. This however was only a temporary effusion ... for Morland 
 could not be insensible to the knowledge of detail and vast power of 
 execution of that painter. When on one occasion he visited the Poets' 
 Gallery with William Ward, the pictures by Loutherbourg were almost the 
 only ones he attended to, but these he contemplated for a considerable 
 time. He was also a great admirer of Wilson and Hogarth. 
 
 " One of his favourite studies was drawing in a variety of views the 
 heads of animals, which he preserved with the skin on for that purpose. 
 
 " In 1 79 1 he painted for Colonel Stewart the picture called The 
 
34 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 Benevolent Sportsman, which had been ordered for three years, as a 
 companion to The Gipsies. This he completed in a week and received 
 seventy guineas for it. 
 
 " He never prosecuted any plan for future employment. When his 
 drawing-books sold rapidly, and the publishers were making immense 
 profits by them, he was urged to etch and publish them himself. This 
 he several times resolved to do . . . copper plates were bought, but the 
 only use he ever made of them was to alarm the publisher, and induce 
 him to give a more liberal price." 
 
 In the period of his maturity, which Dawe fixes at six years (say 
 17S7-93), "he described" \i. e. painted] "the habits and manners of the 
 lower class of people in this country, in a style peculiarly his own. No 
 painter so much as himself ever shared in the vulgarities of such society 
 perhaps, Brouwer excepted, who in many points much resembled 
 Morland. . . . Completely to observe any particular class we must indeed 
 take them in their unguarded moments, and in some degree reduce our- 
 selves to their level by participating in their manners, sports and employ- 
 ments. . . . Morland's pictures owe their peculiar excellence to . . . his 
 long observation of common life. 
 
 " His originality was not the effect of an extreme acquaintance with 
 the productions of art ; but was rather owing to this neglect of them, 
 which obliged him to depend only on himself and nature. . . . With other 
 artists he never held any intercourse, nor had he prints of any kind in his 
 possession. . . . He was induced to see Lord Bute's pictures, but having 
 sauntered through one room, refused to see more, declaring he was averse 
 to contemplate any man's works, fearing he might become an imitator. 
 He forgot that he was indebted to his study of the Dutch and other 
 masters when young. 
 
 " Never having extended his views beyond the subjects he painted he 
 seldom made the most of his subjects. A cottager's red cloak or 
 wagoner's frock will sometimes form folds as worthy of imitation as the 
 drapery of any Greek statue ; but not having sufficiendy cultivated his 
 taste, he was unable to avail himself of the higher beauties of his subjects. 
 
 '* The pictures of Morland did indeed rise considerably " [in reputation 
 and value] " after his death ; but as the works of an artist will at length 
 be jusdy appreciated by true connoisseurs, they cannot (excepting his 
 choicest productions) be expected to continue increasing in value. 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 35 
 
 Hitherto most people have been willing to buy only such pictures as they 
 could dispose of again to advantage, for there is not yet much real taste in 
 the country ; and till an artist has acquired a name, few will purchase his 
 works, still less will they pay liberally for them : high price is rather the 
 consequence of high reputation than of real talent . . . thus it is quite 
 sufficient that a picture is by Morland. 
 
 "About 1790 he appears to have arrived at his meridian : he was then 
 able to paint whatever he chose, and to bestow on his pictures as much 
 time as he thought proper. He had acquired confidence in his powers, 
 and a knowledge of nature, which he had not yet ceased to consult. His 
 best productions were his interiors : indeed the more confined the subject 
 the greater was his success. 
 
 " His gipsies are admirable, he often associated with them, and has 
 lived with them for several days together, adopting their mode of life and 
 sleeping with them in barns at night. 
 
 " It is the state which succeeds exertion in which Morland excels. 
 In the delineation of humble life, faithfulness of representation is essential, 
 but this does not preclude selection ; the former requisite chiefly was 
 possessed by Morland, and it is for this we admire his works. He 
 always paid great attention to the costume of figures in common life, and 
 to all those minutiae which escape ordinary observation, but which when 
 judiciously introduced by the painter stamp an identity on the subject. 
 
 "Though Morland selected and combined but little, he had an 
 extremely quick recollection of those situations and combinations in nature 
 which were suited to his purpose. The Farmers Stable (National 
 Gallery) was composed in this way ; the stable being that belonging to 
 the White Lion at Paddington, and the horses portraits which he painted 
 in the casual position in which he saw them come in. Indeed he was so 
 much attached to horses that he may be said for a great part of his life 
 almost to have lived in stables. 
 
 "The degree in which he succeeded" [in the qualities of colour, 
 contrast, light and shade] " seems to have been the effect of feeling or of 
 eye, i. e. of lessons acquired he knew not when or how. . . . He never 
 made a complete sketch for the plan of his pictures. . . . He generally began 
 upon the canvas with the chalk or brush at once, sometimes even without 
 knowing what he was going to paint, inventing as he proceeded. . . . When 
 he found his knowledge deficient he had recourse to nature, and never 
 
36 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 gave himself any trouble that he could avoid. If perplexed about the legs 
 of a horse, he would copy them from life, but would draw the legs only ; 
 as he never copied more than was absolutely necessary he seldom drew 
 enough, and his animals are often incorrect and ill put together. Hence 
 arose that inequality observable in his pictures, in which we sometimes 
 meet with parts that are transcripts from nature tacked to others that 
 would disgrace a novice in the art, notwithstanding the skill he possessed 
 in adapting those which he drew. He was dexterous in avoiding fore- 
 shortening and similar difficulties. 
 
 "The landscapes in his backgrounds he drew from nature ; the trees 
 and ponds can still be pointed out in the fields about Camden Town, 
 which he introduced in the pictures he executed while residing there. 
 When he painted his picture of Birds -Nesting he went to Caen Wood 
 and made a drawing of the trees and the rest of the landscape. 
 
 "As to his execution. He made no outlines : his dead colour, though 
 careless, generally comprehended the plan and effect of his picture, and 
 much of it was suffered to stand in the finishing with the aid of a little 
 glazing and scumbling. He early discarded the old practice of going 
 over the picture with two or three coats of colour, until all clearness and 
 transparency was destroyed. It has been suggested that Morland was 
 unable to finish highly ; character of a broad and obvious kind was his 
 sole aim and chief excellence. . . . He was so flattered by the reception of 
 the Farmer s Stable'' \Inside of a Stable, now in the National Gallery] 
 that he declared next year he would show what he could do. With this 
 view he painted The Strawyard, and bestowed on it more than usual 
 care and attention, because it was maintained by many that he could not 
 finish. The Strawyard, however, was by no means equal to the former, 
 and seemed only to confirm the criticism it was meant to dispute." 
 
 Of Morland's method of work, and the subjects by which he displayed 
 that method, enough has been said ; on the subject of his place in art, the 
 connection with Millet and Lepage already touched on, and the evolution 
 of living or lately deceased men from all three, several ideas are worth 
 discussing. To begin with, let us note the gradual development of art in 
 the line of Morland's subjects. The first idea that strikes one in this 
 connection is at once the likeness and the divergence of country life one 
 hundred years ago and now, if we are content to see it in the paintings of 
 Morland and his successors. His hunting scenes are interesting in their 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 37 
 
 likeness to similar scenes at the present day ; bar some difference in 
 costume, and the stamp of the horses, any one of these pictures might 
 represent a hunting scene of last season. His shooting scenes are mainly 
 interesting as showing divergence in custom ; for " driving " game, and 
 what is called battue shooting, were unknown to him. He, who did not 
 know what a railway, or a steam-engine or a steamboat was, found for his 
 models ostlers, postboys, labourers, fishermen, sailors and smugglers. 
 Some among them were the ancestors ot the navvy and the labourer of 
 to-day, ancestors by no means equal in physique to their descendants 
 probably, but of very much the same habits as to physical life. Few 
 people paint the navvy now-a-days : I can only recall five or six salient 
 instances — one in Madox Brown's superb picture Work, where there is a 
 young navvy sifting gravel, if I remember right, and a magnificent 
 specimen of the athlete he is. Fred Walker's young navvy in The Old 
 Gate, Hey wood Hardy's picture of navvies making a railway, and two 
 pictures by Briton Riviere, Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, afterwards alluded to, 
 and Gia7tts at Play, now at the Tate Gallery. Of peasants there are 
 many examples to-day, and with the exception of slight changes in dress 
 they might be the very folk we find in Morland's pictures. Of gipsies 
 there are few worth mentioning ; the first one thinks of is Fred Walker's 
 Vagrants, but these are somewhat idealized ; it is a beautiful realization of 
 Walker's method, but not the real thing such as Morland could give us 
 (see the description further on of Sir Charles Hamilton's picture by him, 
 Gipsies). Robert Macbeth has given us rustics of all kinds, still a 
 little idealized (for the spell of Walker was on him for a time), and some 
 sporting pictures much later. Frank Bramley has given us the life of the 
 farms in the south-west and north-west. Stanhope Forbes the sea-shore 
 life of Cornwall ; Clausen and La Thangue and Smythe the life of the earth 
 labourer everywhere almost in England, or in the north of France ; 
 Napier Hemy, the titanic race of fisherfolk, notably in his pictures shown 
 at the Royal Academy Exhibitions of 1897 and 1898 ; Blinks and 
 Denholm Armour give hunting and shooting scenes. Cart-horses, dogs 
 and sheep, ploughing, sowing, reaping, sporting, all these subjects of out- 
 door life are each year more passionately and lovingly seized upon and 
 painted, not only by the men named but by many others coming fast upon 
 their heels ; it seems, indeed, as if we hang on more desperately every 
 month to subjects of pure open air and simplicity in life, primitive nature, 
 
38 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 as civilization and increase in population daily crowd us further away from 
 simplicity and fresh air. Going back a little, we have Wilkie's earlier 
 subjects of peasant and homely life, dating from shortly after Morland's death 
 till 1825 ; next comes the well-known picture combined of animals and their 
 human satellites, Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair the National Gallery ; that 
 is dated in the fifties. Landseer never really painted a peasant in his life, 
 though his dogs are unsurpassed or unequalled : so that really, from 
 Morland's latest countable date, say 1797, we have, with the exception of 
 these three last-named masters and the two Herrings, a blank of at least 
 seventy years, say till 1867, without any serious example in England of 
 peasant and animal life combined, or of sporting life. On this latter subject, 
 however, we should here mention Stubbs, who was practically a con- 
 temporary of Morland, or perhaps rather his predecessor, being born thirty- 
 nine years before Morland but dying two years later. According to Hassell, 
 Morland studied and admired Stubbs' work, indeed Stubbs is called the god 
 of his idolatry. After Stubbs came Aiken and Herring, but Aiken no more 
 than Morland really broke loose from the convention of representing horses 
 at a gallop, though he is the first, or one of the first, artists who gives us horses 
 jumping fences. This, so far as I know, Morland very rarely attempted. 
 The younger Herring, I • think it was, who first painted fox-hunting 
 seriously, with the desire to give the action of a horse in leaping, rising to 
 his leap or refusing, and with an evident knowledge of construction and 
 movement. There is a really fine series of paintings of a hunting run by 
 Herring, junr., in one of which a black-brown horse rising at his jump and 
 a chestnut {J) refusing, are more finely rendered than anything previous 
 of the same kind, and nothing since has surpassed it. The sporting 
 pictures of to-day are mostly poor things enough, so far as we can judge 
 from examples in the London shops, and for real drawing of horses, 
 sporting dogs and hounds in all kinds of movement we must look, for 
 horses, at Degas in France ; for horses, hounds, sporting dogs, and collies, 
 at Blinks, or at Denholm Armour in Punch for all of them. These last, 
 though done in very few lines, are far in advance of anything of the kind by 
 any previous painter or draughtsman, being free from mannerism, and the 
 result of that ruthless and accurate observation mentioned in respect of all 
 good modern men. The same remark applies to his men, mounted or not. 
 
 In fact to-day, say one hundred years from the date of Morland's latest 
 masterpiece, we have, perhaps, half-a-score artists of first-rate calibre 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 39 
 
 working on detailed lines in subjects connected with the earth, and its 
 tillers, human and animal, here at home, and with hunting and sport ; 
 half-a-score against one such in the last century. Between these half- 
 score painters who are now at work, and Morland, there is no link save 
 the uncertain one of Stubbs, Wilkie, Aiken, the Herrings, Rosa Bonheur, 
 Landseer and Ansdell. Not a trace is there of such continued influence 
 of tradition as governed the Dutch and Flemish painters from Van 
 Eyck onwards, as already mentioned. Those men began at a point 
 where the road had (figuratively) been made sound as a Roman road 
 or a modern macadamized one, and proceeded to make as sound a 
 one on and on, for successors to travel back over, and see what had 
 been done by the dead builders in the way of monuments along it. 
 Our present English school, beginning say with Walker and Mason, 
 on arriving at their pioneering point found nothing but a disused 
 road scarcely recognizable as a road at all on the surrounding waste, 
 stretching back through years, in the same unused condition, to the place 
 where Morland had dropped his tools and died all too early. Along 
 that disused road there was little travelling back, and the influence 
 that governed Walker and Mason came as much or more from the 
 upheaval in thought and method arising from the pre-Raphaelite move- 
 ment as from any more obvious looking backwards, — except in so far 
 as, looking back, they learned what to avoid. Macbeth's manner was 
 always his own, but in him we find traces of the recent tradition of 
 Walker and Pinwell, Mason, and Houghton, and later of North in the 
 hne of landscape, — Houghton being in his life a unique specimen of 
 nineteenth-century Morlandism ; in the character of his genius quite 
 widely separated, subtler and more varied, and altogether outside the 
 scope of this monograph. 
 
 So that while there must be some occult reason, like what is known 
 as atavism or throwing back in physiological traits, for the recrudescence 
 of peasant, and outdoor and animal life as subjects treated by first- 
 rate men, after so long a period of sterility, we cannot claim for Morland 
 that he had any sort of direct influence on the history of his country's 
 art, as regards either the subjects attacked, or the method of painting, 
 further than the influence which universal admiration of really fine 
 painting quality must always exercise. By way of parenthesis one 
 may cite another example of splendid isolation in the case of Constable 
 
40 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 in the domain of landscape ; he had, it is true, Gainsborough, Wilson, 
 Callcott and others behind him, but he started afresh, uninfluenced it 
 would seem (unless antagonistically) by any one except perhaps 
 Gainsborough. He died in 1837, and yet we find him also without 
 followers until lately, when Thorne Waite, and Withers, and perhaps 
 Alfred East sometimes, seem to have been fascinated by his way of 
 building up the design of his pictures in such instances as The Hay-wain 
 or The Barge picture or The Cenotaph. 
 
 While there exists then this unaccountable interval in the history 
 of purely English art between Morland and his successors in England, 
 two facts must be noted, each of interest in themselves, with regard to 
 a possible chain of connection between Morland and his confreres of 
 to-day, and a more direct connection between those confreres and other 
 artists across the Channel. The first fact is twofold ; that there is in 
 the Louvre a single example of Morland called La Halte, and that 
 in his early career he went over to Calais and St. Omer (in October 
 1785, his twenty-second year), and painted a good deal there, and though 
 most of his patrons then were probably Scotch and English (he mentions 
 refugees from '* the 45 "), it is very possible some of his works remained 
 on French soil. The other fact is closely connected with the presence 
 of a fairly important work of his in the Louvre. From 1790 onwards 
 there appears to have been a pretty steady market for engravings or 
 mezzotints after his pictures, in France. Sporting subjects such as 
 La Chasse a la Bdcassine, La Chasse de la Bdcasse, La Chasse dzc Canard, 
 La Chasse dit, Lievre, were all engraved during this and the following 
 year 1791 by A. Suntach. Indeed we learn from Mr. Richardson that 
 during these years 1790 — 1797, he grew to be quite a fashionable 
 painter, run after not merely " in England, but in France, and Germany 
 as well ; " and that Morland's " fame is largely due to the admirable 
 style in which his pictures were engraved and published broadcast 
 through Europe. They will now be found for sale in many parts of 
 the Continent," and Mr. Richardson discovered "on pricing prints after 
 Morland for sale at Dresden, that the prices there were if anything higher 
 than those stated in London." 
 
 Now Millet was born in 18 14, only ten years after Morland's death, 
 and lived for sixty -one years (till 1875); that he could be directly 
 influenced by one or even half-a-dozen pictures by Morland which 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 41 
 
 may have found their way across the Channel to France, or by others 
 which were painted at St. Omer and remained in France — that he 
 ever noticed much the engravings after Morland executed for the 
 French market — is very improbable. But there is a pleasure in pointing 
 out that first, speaking in general terms Morland's genius was known 
 and acknowledged in France during his lifetime, and for years after 
 his death, and second that the chain of connection between painters 
 in this genre, which has been spoken of as being broken for seventy 
 years in England, was not so much broken as diverted, taking a bend 
 across to France with an inappreciable interval between the death ot 
 one master in England and the birth of another in France. That the 
 methods of the two masters were widely different in some respects, 
 and strongly similar in others, as already pointed out, has nothing to 
 do with what we are now considering, which is the gradual evolution 
 in painting, by masters of different countries, of subjects that lay close 
 round them, subjects the most primitive and simple, but racy of the 
 soil. And here again by way of parenthesis we may note that while 
 Morland's name was thoroughly recognized in France, Constable's was 
 not much if at all later to be so too : for all the world knows the 
 influence wielded by Constable's works on the later and still triumphant 
 French school of landscape painters, and on taste among French 
 picture dealers and buyers. 
 
 The chain of connection, as I said, took a kink across the Channel : 
 Millet became an established force, and by way of antagonism perhaps 
 influenced Lepage to work in quite another direction, which, as before 
 hinted, might probably have led him by a roundabout way, had he 
 lived longer, to such a wide-reaching and profound grasp of truth in 
 art as might have surpassed Millet himself. At any rate, the spirit 
 of painting in the genre of homely life, of painting only the things 
 seen by the painter in the life around him, whether he remained at home 
 or, like Delacroix, travelled abroad for subjects, only fluttered for a 
 while in the air between the death of Morland and the birth of Millet. 
 During Millet's and Lepage's lives came Clausen and Smythe to France 
 from over sea, and through some innate brotherhood took up the torch 
 that was dying in the hands of the two French masters ; took it with 
 a strong hand, and carry it with a stronger hand to-day. 
 
 Now that we have come to some idea of continuity in this progress 
 
42 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 of home-loving, home-seeing art, let us note a strong example of 
 upward evolution not only in method and treatment, but in subject 
 matter. No picture of Morland's worth noticing is without its unique 
 charm of tone and atmosphere : his greatest achievements are master- 
 pieces of drawing and modelling as well, of largeness of thought and 
 grasp of conception. But of characterization, portraiture, whether 
 individual or typical, there seems little or none, if we look only at his 
 men and women, with here and there an exception, as in the case 
 of that remarkable picture The Hard Bargain, a mezzotint from which 
 is described further on. His men, so far as I have seen them, are 
 (with that and other exceptions to be mentioned) apt to be overgrown 
 boys, who seem to have no muscle, and are born idlers. His horses 
 and pigs, on the contrary, are so presented that the queer fancy comes 
 across one, was it the spirit of a horse or a pig that guided the pencil 
 or brush } Elsewhere I have noted that his animals stamp their image 
 vividly on the retina, while his men and women are shadowy at best ; 
 the implements of farm labour, the corn-bins, and buckets, and wheel- 
 barrows, all the things most nearly touching the sense of a horse or pig, 
 these too are vivid enough, as they would be to such animals' senses, 
 while their masters, the men and women, would seem to them mere 
 vague images who brought those implements into use for the convenience 
 or punishment of the animal concerned. 
 
 In Millet's work, on the contrary, the central interest is always human, 
 and shows humanity earth-born, earth-held, toilsome and to toil. The 
 characterization, though always typical, and hardly at all individual, is 
 always also energetic, convincing, and calls forth — however much or 
 little it may have evoked in the painter — strong sympathy from the 
 onlooker. From Millet to Lepage,— whether it be a backward step, 
 according to Mr. Sickert, or, according to Mr. Clausen, a sideway 
 advance destined to outstep Millet — the step is at any rate from the 
 general to the particular, from the type to the portrait, and yet (with 
 these two censors' leave) it too, whatever Lepage felt, evokes strong 
 sympathy, and the essence of the work is of one blood with Millet's 
 conceptions. Both Millet and Lepage, in short, do in a large and com- 
 plete manner what Morland, trammelled by his temperament and his era, 
 had achieved in a lower degree before them ; they, each in his way, make 
 the realism and the inner significance of peasant life into a great epic. 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 43 
 
 With no perceptible break, the tradition of which Morland was the 
 pioneer, the passion for painting the life men saw around them in their 
 own country, has been carried on with love and energy, through Millet 
 and Lepage, by the men now living. But here the force of evolution 
 shows itself : where Morland, with all his preterhuman energy and prolific 
 gift, inevitably repeated himself by generalized or typical pictures of 
 farmers, labourers, fishermen, innkeepers, sportsmen, smugglers, seafolk, 
 ostlers and postboys, with the accompanying dogs, horses, pigs, sheep, 
 and donkeys, often more real than their human owners, seventy years 
 later we find a number of men not generalizing, but specializing in various 
 branches of their subjects, bringing to bear on each branch a keen and 
 trained observing power, and giving us every technical detail of the 
 subject with anxious accuracy. Macbeth gives us sheep-shearing, " tatur- 
 ing," a led stallion at a country inn door, apple harvests, stag-hunters seen 
 through a mist on a Somersetshire hillside, and the unsurpassed hunting 
 scene, shown at the Royal Academy in 1897, called The End of a 
 Good Day, which, notwithstanding some careless drawing, gives more of 
 the "inwardness," the delight which follows the kingly sport of riding 
 hard and well, more of the scent and crispness of evening air, steaming 
 horses and tired hounds, than all Morland's hunting pictures put together. 
 Clausen has given us The Mowers, Bird-scaring^ BoyThreshing, and The 
 Hay-barn. In the two first-named, the directness of method, both in 
 rendering sunlit figures and strong action, are, like the work presently 
 mentioned of Bramley and La Thangue, examples of indirect descent 
 from Morland, but as types of ruthless and accurate observation, an 
 immense advance on him. In the two latter pictures the management of 
 interior lighting, and in the Boy Threshing one must add the exquisite 
 drawing of the boy ; his raised, bare arms, thin and brown, full of young 
 vigour and nerve, are equally examples of the same ruthless observation, 
 and of advance in evolution. Stanhope Forbes gives us a piece of high 
 finish, local truth and exact portraiture in The Health of the Bride, A 
 Cornish Auction, a splendid piece of interior lighting and blacksmith 
 life in Forging the Anchor, with its weighty movement in the giant 
 smith who wields the sledgehammer ; and another detail of blacksmith 
 and country life in his picture of a horse being shod, where the grey 
 cart-horse is up to the highest mark in the way of drawing and modelling, 
 to say nothing of the management of light and tone throughout the work. 
 
44 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 Edward Simmons in The Mother gave us a piece of simple peasant life, 
 finer in achievement than anything in its line before or since. La Thangue 
 and Frank Bramley in this year of 1898 give us, the latter a sheep-shearing 
 in Cumberland, the former Harvesters at Supper, in each of which 
 technical detail is unobtrusively but faithfully rendered, and in the last- 
 named picture the pathos and fine drawing of the tired young girl and the 
 reticent treatment of the man seated next her and looking at her, are as 
 far in advance of anything Morland ever did (in the way of human 
 sympathy) as Morland was in advance of Wheatley. There was, too, in 
 1897 a picture by Frank Bramley at the Royal Academy called While 
 there is Life there is Hope. An interior of a farmhouse, a newly-born 
 lamb lying by dim embers, a man and girl standing by with a lantern, 
 a rough sheepdog as intently loving as the girl's nascent motherhood 
 could be, a grey cat sitting half-way up some stairs, in dignified indiffer- 
 ence : all treated with masterly skill in the management of light and 
 shade, in the simplicity and breadth of the brush work, — and as fine as 
 The Alchemist by Ostade, mentioned elsewhere, in these respects. 
 
 We have already glanced at Morland's sporting pictures, as compared 
 with those of Thomas Blinks, and pointed out under this head how far 
 Morland falls short. Can it be said that Morland's shooting and hunting 
 pictures, or prints from them, give you life palpitant, as a brace of setters or 
 a leash of collies by Mr. Blinks do, in the modern method of reproduction ? 
 And in another line peculiarly Morland's, compare Briton Riviere's swine 
 in Circe and Great Expectations, with the equally faultless swine of 
 Morland in many examples of his work. Are not the former infinitely 
 above the latter in minuteness of observation, in the rendering of the 
 absolute sensuality and belly worship so mercilessly portrayed by the 
 modern master's skill ? One is apt to forget that Morland was literally 
 the first painter to give us pigs just as they are in a farmyard or at a 
 trough. 
 
 These are a few instances, which might be multiplied but for fear of 
 boredom and too great length. They are enough to show that the 
 workers of to-day, who derive from Morland in their subjects and their 
 sesthetic sympathies, have, in a process of evolution from him, developed, 
 to a vast extent, the variety of their observing power and the ever resdess 
 desire to portray something fresh in their own line, some new detail, some 
 new occupation not hitherto handled by them or any one else. 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 45 
 
 Enough has been said to show what my feeling is, viz. first, that 
 Morland was undoubtedly a pioneer for these men ; that though they 
 might claim Millet, Lepage, and the Barbizon school generally as in- 
 fluencing them, Morland was the first man to see the paintableness of the 
 life of his time, in its outdoor and peasant or proletariat aspect. Second, 
 that when at his highest point of achievement, he equalled even his 
 masters — his indirect masters — the Dutch, and could give points in mere 
 painting to them or to any of his English successors. Third, that, as has 
 been said, his is a case of splendid isolation ; that he is a landmark in art 
 which painters to-day have to take into account, if on the ground of his 
 painting and drawing faculty alone. 
 
 But he has another and more weighty claim for remembrance. 
 For here we find ourselves carried back, as by the indraw of a sea-tide, 
 to a point on which Morland's influence remains eternal ; and it involves 
 that old vexed question of subject, literary picture, the telling of a story. 
 Here is a point where that matter can no longer be evaded, in determin- 
 ing, from an artist's and not a Philistine's, point of view, the lasting 
 quality of Morland's finest pictures and of the school of painters who in 
 date succeeded him. 
 
 In discussing such a matter it is impossible to get outside one's own 
 personal prejudices or predilections, but certain principles stand fast, and 
 one of them is that no painter has ever achieved great rank without 
 possessing an innate love first of life and then of all that life means to 
 him or her through the senses. Of this the great Spaniard, the great 
 Italians, and the great French, Dutch and Flemish masters were brimful ; 
 each of them was possessed with this love of life and of all that life 
 could bring or mean to their senses. Without this, Velasquez's 
 brush would be, compared with what it is, as a cymbal clashed by a child 
 compared with Joachim's violin — the genius of the Barbizon men, of 
 Manet, Degas and Monet, would be, without this, no more than a 
 clever puppet show by the side of a performance by Mrs. Siddons or 
 Ellen Terry. The mere use of the brush to give a vague sensation, 
 however splendid, of according tones without animate interest, without 
 any appeal to the spirit that looks before and after, to the passionate joie 
 de vivre, can never rise beyond the level of a tottr de force, a piece of 
 gymnastic. In short, at the end, at the last judgment, a picture shall live 
 in proportion as it puts you, the spectator, in the place, under the circum- 
 
46 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 stances, depicted. The place may be a misty moor, or a riverside with 
 never a man or animal within earshot of it ; the place may be even an 
 empty waste of sky. But, in order that it may live, some jet of the 
 artist's or painter's life, or of that desire, that passion for life which we 
 call his soul, must have gone mystically from his innermost self and, as 
 a very part of his essence, to the creation of his hand. Let that condition 
 be found to exist in it, then, subject or none, story or none, if it be finely 
 done (and here comes in an irony of fate), you shall not notice at first 
 how it is done ; whether the picture be a bit of field or sky, a lane, a 
 wood, a moor, a group of figures or a single figure, it must at the first 
 and in its own way, take you out of your own bodily surroundings and 
 set you in its own dreamland ; give you, for the moment, a new sight, a 
 new life in its life, a dreamland as vivid as that of some detached hour 
 which rises again from your past life, shining and scented with the 
 spring. This life spirit cannot be killed or even lulled asleep by calling 
 a picture a harmony, an arrangement or a symphony ; it palpitates through 
 the Symphony in White, the Carlyle, the Rose Corder, and many other 
 works by that same master-hand ; it will not dwell in any painting or 
 sculpture begun as mere handicraft, or skill in juxtaposing colours or 
 tones, or in mere modelling or drawing. It is impalpable, evasive and 
 independent of the intellectual will of the artist who is working. Like 
 "the Kingdom of God, it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a 
 great yearning." A chef-d'wuvi^e, having this life spirit, like a fine soul, 
 is never importunate, never obtrudes its skill of handling. Indeed, this 
 life spirit in a work of art is really the essence of the highest technique, 
 and whatever the subject or lack of it in the picture, determines its ulti- 
 mate value. It is present (in an ironic sense it may be, but still there) in 
 the Sargent portraits of the year 1898. The inspired phrase applied to 
 him (as to his treatment of his sitters) that he " hates them with splendid 
 accuracy," is only a piece of special pleading on my side of the question. 
 Whistler has it, in spite of his diablerie. It is triumphant in all the 
 modern men I have coupled with Morland. Morland himself was full of 
 it, and could not have done a stroke without it. Given this element in 
 a picture, and it — the picture — must have its lovers, and eventually its 
 buyers and possessors. I like to think that this is why justice (all but 
 unconscious perhaps) is being done to his daring and originality in thus 
 striking out a line in art for himself, a line which his brother (contem- 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 47 
 
 porary) artists had quite failed to see, though it stared them in the face. 
 And justice is being done not only to this daring, but to the acumen and 
 foresight of the very swindlers who kept Morland at work on ludicrously 
 inadequate pay, in order to secure for themselves and their descendants 
 property in the way of Morland pictures, which was certain to pay many 
 hundreds per cent, on the outlay. The form this justice takes to-day is 
 the way in which an undoubted Morland of a good period is always 
 treasured ; such a work rarely if ever finds itself thrust out into the cold 
 atmosphere of curiosity shops, or fifth-rate dealers. Thus when a gem 
 by other masters may be picked up for a song, Morland's work is in 
 drawing-rooms and dining-rooms now. This is as it should be. In a 
 hundred years, what a man was is wiped off the slate ; to take two 
 instances opposite to Morland's in individuality, the blameless, uneventful, 
 even colourless lives of Van Eyck or Sir J. Reynolds, do not one whit 
 more touch us in our estimate of their great genius than do the stormy 
 and enthralling life-stories of either Rembrandt or Morland in our judg- 
 ment of their work. The only difference between the two pairs of men 
 is, that in the former case we are left cold on laying aside the story of 
 their lives ; in the latter case we thrill as after reading a well-constructed 
 piece of invention in writing. And so it will be to the end : the works 
 of Clausen and La Thangue and the others will in a hundred years be 
 treasured as are the Morlands and Hoppners to-day. Time only is the 
 ripener and the supreme judge. 
 
 In short, though there are plenty of people who buy from motives of 
 vanity, good speculation, outbidding for emulation's sake, and other outside 
 causes, the born picture owners have an instinctive, if unconscious, eye 
 for and love of that life-spirit which is the essence of all good work, apart 
 from name or school, an eye which judges on sight, whether the picture 
 be first seen in a garret or a gallery. The men who bought Morland's 
 pictures in his lifetime, and the men who now buy or possess them, belong 
 to both classes ; for though in many of his works consummate handling and 
 sense of colour and tone value, and sometimes drawing of a fascinating 
 delicacy, are the only virtue, in all his best work there is, besides these 
 things, the soul of the man, keeping his eye and mind and hand for the 
 time at least in happy subjugation. Thus the first true lovers of Morland, 
 those men who lived during his life, were prophets as well as lovers,, 
 and knew they were securing for posterity a visible piece of immortality. 
 
48 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 I have already alluded to the number, counted by thousands, of the 
 pictures produced by Morland ; even such a slight one as the Quarry 
 'with Peasants, in the National Gallery, is such a glimpse of soul-guided 
 hand. But when we look at what is possibly his greatest achievement, 
 The Inside of a Stable, also in the National Gallery, or, among several, 
 Gathering Sticks, The Hard Bargain, the pictures of children at Sir 
 Charles Tennant's and Mr. Harland Peck's, or the Gipsies at Sir Charles 
 Hamilton's, all elsewhere described, we are for once obliged, knowing all 
 of Morland's life, to say that how a man lives has something to do with 
 the character of his work. There is a daemon (SaZ/Atov) of painting : 
 sometimes it takes a solid, well-built house to dwell in and illumine ; 
 sometimes its lodging is crazy, crumbling, rotten from the foundation 
 upwards ; still the daemon illumines it, but fitfully, and the light is 
 extinguished suddenly with a crash. It was worth while to have been 
 the tenement of the daemon which created these pictures. 
 
 From the question of the reasons why people buy pictures, to the 
 question of prices is an easy step : in Morland's case the prices he got 
 during his life would appear to-day ludicrously low, even for work far 
 below his worst in quality, and even making every allowance for the 
 difference in the value of money then as compared with its value now-a- 
 days. It is worth while to say something on this subject. 
 
 An initiative opinion can only in the first resort be formed, and in the 
 last resort used as a force, in regard of the work of any painter living 
 or dead, by his brother painters themselves, and not by any outside 
 public. It is the painters by whom every man's work is stamped as 
 good, bad, or indifferent. Even in Morland's case, while we know that 
 he carried his independence of the study of his contemporaries and 
 predecessors almost to the point of mania, though he mixed little if at 
 all with his equals in art, his genius was known and acknowledged from 
 his earliest years by the foremost painters of his time : and to be known 
 by such men is to be talked about. Morland, in fact, started with a 
 strong consensus of opinion in his favour, and had not, as have so many 
 men of equally high gifts, to fight his way at first through the opposition 
 or the weight of indifference of brother craftsmen who did not know 
 what he would be at in the first instance. But whether the case be 
 Morland's, who though acknowledged by his brother artists spoiled his 
 own chances, or that of Millet or of Lepage who had to so fight their 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 49 
 
 way, or that of Rossetti, Millais, and Madox Brown, who also had to 
 combat strong suspicion or worse indifference, securus judicat the weight 
 of opinion in artists, in the case of any master, and sooner or later. The 
 expert workmen in any particular craft are the only radical judges of 
 the work of that craft. Morland was neither head nor member of any 
 clique : in his time the word did not exist, and there were not enough 
 men of individuality to make the cohesion necessary to produce a clique. 
 The few great men of his time seem to have worked alone, and each 
 for his own hand, with little jealousy, if with occasional coldness towards 
 each other. But the charmed circle of artists of that period originated 
 the demand for Morland's work among buyers. 
 
 Now a painter's aesthetic value being fixed, and a working force of 
 living painters' opinion always existing in regard to it, next comes the 
 buyer's part in establishing reputations. The buyer's part, though 
 perhaps in some cases indirectly, invariably has its beginning from 
 the consensus of opinion among painters, and has little or no originating 
 force of its own. Between the beginning of the fifteenth and the end of 
 the seventeenth century, a period of three hundred years, the men of 
 the Flemish and Dutch schools in the course of their work must have 
 stored an incalculable force of aesthetic judgment which acted as a pro- 
 pelling power for the English school just before and during Morland's 
 career : hence the artists of his time knew what to look for, and recognized 
 at sight the new genius arrived among them. The masters of the 
 Flemish and Dutch schools depended for their aesthetic existence on each 
 other alone, for their material livelihood on folk (including the Catholic 
 Church) who bought those masters' productions for their own spiritual or 
 mental pleasure or profit, but in no way with a thought of speculating. 
 Increase of population and wealth, and consequent love of masterpieces, 
 is a very good summary reason for the gradual evolution of the 
 connoisseur. We know how, outside the charmed circle of artists of 
 his time, there existed a strong Morland clique among buyers, but though 
 the men of that type helped to keep alive the knowledge of Morland's 
 genius that his brother-painters first made known, neither the dealer of 
 Morland's time nor the dealer of to-day has done, or ever can do, more 
 than endorse the enduring decision of the artists as to the aesthetic value 
 of Morland's work ; and it is this enduring judgment which has 
 gradually thrust onward the knowledge of that work, until it has 
 reached the high place it holds in the picture market of to-day. 
 
50 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 Certain characteristics in Morland's work must finally be noted, some 
 inevitable and the consequence of the nature and circumstances of the 
 man, some of lasting value as linking him on terms of brotherhood, on 
 the one hand with the more strenuous and searching workers of the two 
 hundred years preceding him in Belgium and Holland, on the other hand 
 with the equally strenuous workers in France and England during the 
 nineteenth century and up to the present date. We have to admit the 
 immense advance in certain respects of the men in France and England, 
 who have continued the road Morland began ; the advance already noted 
 in variety of choice as to subject, and the vastly increased and increasing 
 reach of vision as shown in details of drawing and modelling, in 
 knowledge and production of varieties of effect. Morland, had he been 
 sober, might have attacked such a subject as Mr. Clausen's Mozvers, 
 and other instances of that master's courage in dealing with difficult 
 problems of sunlight. 
 
 But Morland was not sober, and his courage was not of that kind. 
 As for effect, light and shade, the truth is that if you have seen one 
 Morland representing an open-air subject, you have seen all ; there is 
 great charm in all, the charm of colour on a limited scale, and {pace Mr. 
 Richardson and Mr. Dawe) the charm of atmosphere and management 
 of light ; but these are only of one kind — the filmy atmosphere, the 
 filtered light of late summer afternoons when the air is full of the promise 
 of rain and is mistily warm. As compared with the loving and searching 
 exactness of detail, never importunate, of the Dutchmen, or the thought- 
 out drawing of movement, the purpose in movement, which is only lately 
 strongly expressed in Millet and now in Clausen, Hemy, La Thangue, 
 Macbeth, and the other Englishmen before mentioned, Morland is far 
 behind. None of his men are doing very much ; they look as if they 
 never had done or would do much. They, in truth, lounged through their 
 lives, the originals of these pictures; not one of them, even of the 
 seafolk and smugglers, worked so hard as the painter of them, in his 
 double harness of painting and drink. Excepting the man in Sir 
 Charles Hamilton's Gipsies, and the butcher and his man in The 
 Hard Bargain, I have not seen a single ruffian or cross-grained ugly 
 customer among all Morland's men, though there is a sinister look about 
 the figure of the man to the right in Sir Walter Gilbey's Gipsy 
 Encampment. In fact, as said before, his men are mostly over-grown 
 boys, or milkmen dressed up as farm labourers or woodcutters. 
 
MORLAND THE PAINTER 
 
 51 
 
 In painting horses, on the other hand, he seems to have had an 
 intuitive knowledge of the beast, and so powerful is the impression of 
 getting at the root of things when pigs or horses form his main subject, 
 that the men in these pictures are apt to seem shadowy things, wisps of 
 a half-seen vision, a smock, a hat, a pair of gaiters or leggings. It is 
 true that in the great work Inside of a Stable at the National Gallery, 
 the unsurpassed mastery of design and treatment of the two big cart- 
 horses, one white, the other a white-faced brown, and of the cunning, 
 stiff-built Welsh pony beside them, are not all the picture ; the lad with 
 an oak-spray in his coat, who leads the big grey, has the touch of 
 unsunned youth about him, and the largeness of treatment, the light and 
 shadow, the management of toned white, gold, and russet and grey in 
 the tones, are powerful elements in forming the masterpiece ; but the 
 man who kneels gathering hay and straw to the left, large as he bulks in 
 the design, is a poor creature after all, looked at as a living thing, beside 
 those grand and vivid beasts of toil. 
 
 Morland as a pioneer broke out the beginning of a high road which 
 Millet continued (how splendidly !) and from which Lepage cut a by-way, 
 but it is on the Englishmen of to-day that the spirit of Morland — 
 which flitted across the Channel to take a cleaner abode with Millet's 
 soul — has descended, it is those Englishmen who continue the high road. 
 Reckless liver as Morland was, the soul of painting lived in him, and 
 fought hard in its narrow prison of mud wall to keep its light living ; 
 that soul lived in a narrow time, with little in the social atmosphere, even 
 the best and purest, to nourish or stimulate its growth ; a great tradition 
 existed before it and has grown since its eclipse. And though the mind 
 which worked with the soul was wayward, self-centred and passionately 
 averse to accepting outside influence, though the work of past men had 
 little apparent rapport with the work of this strange medley of contradictions 
 we call George Morland, though he wilfully ignored any aesthetic debt to 
 his contemporaries, and we do not know that later men either in England 
 or on the Continent have consciously absorbed much of what in his 
 truest moments Morland had to impart through his work, — that work 
 stands in its own place in the history of European art, and is a fitting 
 and worthy link in the chain of genius which began with Franz Hals and 
 Rembrandt, and has as its latest link at this date Clausen, Bramley, and 
 La Thangue. 
 
Ill 
 
 EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 I. Some pictures by Morland, with some notes on pictures by Ward and Gainsborough. 
 
 In fineness of the same kind as that of the great work in the National 
 Gallery follows close, to my mind, the painting in the South Kensington 
 Museum called Horses in a Stable. Nothing yet done in this 
 genre can excel the vivid manner of the placing of these two great 
 brutes before you. One, with his nose in the manger (.^), is in full 
 profile to the spectator, a sort of sorrel chestnut with cendrd reflections 
 on the ribs and quarter, and a silverish grey mane and tail. The other, 
 lying down in front of him, is white, a coffin-headed beast, a vast bony 
 image of patient strength, with a touch of tragic possibility about him. 
 I believe that in this picture there is a man wheeling a barrow : but the 
 horses I have before my eyes now — the man seems (if indeed he is 
 there) no more than a piece of fine grey tone, veritably a ghost seen by a 
 sceptic. The other fine picture at the South Kensington Museum is 
 called The Valentine, or Valentines Day. Mr. Richardson adds Johnny 
 going to the Fair as a second title. As he also gives 1787 for the date of 
 publication of the engraving from the picture, the painting must at the latest 
 be attributed to Morland's twenty-third or twenty-fourth year. Here I 
 should have said there were no animals save the human ones, but on 
 thinking again I remember a white hen or so lying crooning at the girl's 
 feet. The girl is an exquisite piece of work ; her beauty, however, 
 though indisputable, is as soulless as may be, but her free movement as 
 she holds up to the elder woman the pale blue ribbon for which Johnny, 
 I suppose, is to find a match, is deliciously young. How she could dance 
 
 52 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 
 the "Washington Post" if she were put into a modern drawing-room! 
 And how utterly she lacks all peasant character ! But Morland may be 
 forgiven a good deal for the sake of that one girl. Her mother, or 
 whoever the older woman may be, is at the first glance a peasant with 
 rough wrinkled hands, black hair, and a shrewd, ruddy face lined with low 
 care. But she too is perfectly painted, though in no way idealized. 
 Those are the two pictures of Morland's which are all one notes at the 
 South Kensington Museum for their virtue ; the other which calls for a 
 word must be put far behind the other two, though dated later than the 
 Valentine s Day. It is called The Reckoning, an every-day subject 
 as it happens to be treated, though a suggestive title. Here the man 
 who is paying up, and the two lads (one of whom holds the beer jug) 
 who are going to be paid are all sufficiently en evidence^ and not all 
 ghostly, like others of the men I have mentioned ; the face of the man, a 
 farmer or miller — a substantial yeoman evidently — is finely felt as to 
 expression and broadly and effectively painted : the rest of him, except 
 his movement, is hardly, so to say, painted at all. The lad in red jacket 
 and blue apron, however, and his companion, are splendidly life-like, 
 and their silhouettes are thrown on the canvas in masterly fashion. 
 The horse is all right, and the farmer's two dogs also, but they are no 
 more ; there is a finely-painted ban dog, or some such cross-breed, 
 with a stumpy tail, tied to the manger and looking a deal too good- 
 natured. At the open stable-door, leaning against the jamb, is one of 
 Morland's most boneless and flabbiest of yokels ; of air, of lighting 
 in the sense of chiaroscuro, there seems to me to be not a hint. 
 Two or three side-thoughts come to one, on seeing these two 
 fine Morlands and the one poor one. Looking round at other 
 British masters, how Landseer, with his great staghound in Suspense^ 
 towers head and shoulders over every other painter of animals in the 
 place, including his own other work, in striking out a design with a soul 
 in it. Morland comes near this, however, in the faithful if superficial 
 directness of his vision, in the amazingly rich and sturdy quality of his 
 brush work, in the way he indicates, as in their statues of men the 
 Greeks indicated, the delicate exactness of animal form in its smallest 
 details ; indicates these things with a light hand but thoroughly, as if he 
 had studied anatomy and bones as Swan has, getting the while as fine 
 and generalized a sense of the form, construction, and movement as Swan 
 
54 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 himself gets : and yet Morland, so far as I know, never really studied 
 anatomy. And when the subject of a painting has plainly arrested his 
 interest, how far he again surpasses Landseer in his sense of colour, of 
 a mise-en- scene, in right expression of details, in the presentment of a 
 picture. Look, for instance, at the feather lying on the ground in 
 Landseer's picture Suspense ; it is a point in the picture, such as Mr. 
 Whistler's art critic would love for the story's sake — but it is only a few 
 meaningless trails of paint without vitality — even the steel-covered 
 gloves on the table are merely tinsel at best. With Morland, on the 
 other hand, we have all needful accessories treated with the pains due to 
 them as helping out the main scheme ; the straw crackles and rustles, the 
 leather of the harness, the gold and red or blue and white worsted tassels 
 on the horse collars are heavy as to the leather, and woolly as to the 
 worsted, each as real as the horse that carries them. By way of contrast 
 with Morland again, look at the several examples of James Ward in the 
 South Kensington Museum. Except the picture of fighting bulls (called, 
 I think, Dtinottar Castle), to be presently mentioned, and one of a 
 Chinese pig, not one is to be named in the same week with Morland's 
 pictures, even (in the case of animals) on the mere score of construction, 
 which was supposed to be Ward's strong point, to say nothing of the 
 qualities of colour and painting. Yet Ward very carefully studied 
 anatomy, and he sometimes, as in the Council of Horses, lets you see 
 it too much ; his figures were too apt to be dcorch^s, even in some of his 
 finest studies from nature. But here in the South Kensington Museum 
 his paintings of donkeys, cows, and pigs would strike one, if one knew 
 no other work of his, as the staid performances of the industrious 
 apprentice who never did a brilliant thing and lived till ninety. There 
 is a good deal of go in the action of the fighting bulls, but they are 
 not either painted or drawn with any mastery ; the landscape is fine only 
 in a theatrical way, and the most real thing about it is the tree trunk 
 across which the bulls are struggling. Compare this work with Rubens' 
 landscape at the National Gallery of the Chateau de Stein, to rival 
 which Ward avows in his autobiography that he painted his fighting 
 bulls. How full of lithe natural movement is the man in the fore- 
 ground, in heavy boots and feathered hat, stooping and creeping towards 
 the covey of partridges under cover of bramble and bush, compared with 
 the clumsy anatomical bulls in Ward's picture. 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 
 55 
 
 At the same time I must not omit to notice a fine picture of Ward's 
 at the National Gallery — not for the drawing, which is shaky in parts, 
 but because of the sense of values and the fine colour, as well 
 as for the realism of the sullen level grey cloud, overhanging, like a 
 curtain half let down, the primrose-coloured sunset. It is called Regent's 
 Park in 1807. The management of tone in the painting of the white 
 bull is excellent ; and apart from the fine tone and aesthetic value of the 
 whole work, it has a historical interest, as showing how unreclaimed a 
 waste in the earliest years of the century was the stretch of common 
 land now converted into Regent's Park (and in which at the left of 
 the picture some men are shown at work levelling). Not the least 
 interesting point is that the sky is an exact rendering of many a London 
 sunset of to-day. 
 
 In most of Ward's subject pictures, however, executed as this was 
 after he ceased to be under Morland's influence in painting, the drawing 
 is apt to be queer, as if refracted through an imperfect mirror ; this is 
 noticeable in The Council of Horses, to cite one instance only. I am 
 speaking only of his finished pictures, for his direct studies from nature in 
 chalk or pencil are often as fine as need be, though even in these the 
 anatomy is at times too much insisted on. In his pictures, however, it 
 seems as if in his anxiety to show how well he understood the 
 construction of a beast, he unwittingly exaggerated and therefore 
 deformed the shapes he was representing. His landscapes also are too 
 much detailed throughout, in the distance as much as in the foreground — 
 one feels as if one were looking at ordnance maps ; and the drawing ot 
 objects such as horses and cows, etc., in the middle distance, is apt to 
 be too teased, stringy, and overwrought. 
 
 But of some fine early pictures by Ward, done in connection 
 with or under obvious influence from Morland, I shall say something 
 presently. 
 
 It is also worth while, as we are comparing Morland with 
 contemporaries and successors in similar lines, to notice another man 
 who paints horses, an example of whose work is to be seen not far from 
 the Morland pictures at the South Kensington Museum. This is 
 Thomas Gainsborough, and the horses in his picture, or rather oil-study, 
 are well worth study, though he approaches them in a different way from 
 that of Morland. His horses, in fact, while fine in semblance, may be 
 
56 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 said to be rather studies in a particular method of oil painting, done for 
 the colour's sake and the tone, with little or no line, modelling, or 
 construction ; and yet the spirit of the horse is here and the sense of 
 his colour too, and how good and thirsty is the outstretched neck and 
 muzzle of the rich dapple-brown nearest you, and how the man sits with 
 the ease of the true barebacked seat, his ragged shoes hanging ! What 
 a true gipsy ruffian the man looks; the touch of the great portrait 
 painter is there already. Very different indeed from the round-faced, 
 unsubstantial ghosts of sleek fat peasants which Morland mostly gives 
 us in these pictures at the South Kensington Museum. 
 
 I notice later a fine Gainsborough landscape in Mr. Harland Peck's 
 possession ; but this is the place to describe the large picture by 
 Gainsborough belonging to Sir Charles Tennant, which is evidently 
 painted from the study above mentioned, and which, as seldom happens, 
 is miuch finer than that study, without losing any of the spontaneity of 
 movement. The brown horse drinking is more carefully and powerfully 
 drawn and modelled ; on the right of the picture a grey and white dog, 
 his ears laid viciously back, drinks apprehensively at the trough, his 
 muzzle very near to that of the brown horse. The dapple-grey horse on 
 which the gipsy-like man is seated, is also both finely painted and carefully 
 modelled ; a chain hangs over his quarter ; and the drawing, portraiture, 
 seat, and movement of the man riding him are all given with as ready 
 and unfatigued a hand as in the study. The landscape, too, is 
 magnificently worked out ; broadly, and without that over-insistence on 
 detail which is conspicuous in Ward's landscape work — nay, with finer 
 distinction in brush handling than Morland achieved in his best time. 
 Behind the drinking-trough, and near it, a scarped grey rock rises, over a 
 part of which, to the right, trails a spray of bramble. On the left of the 
 picture, beyond and about the rock, are grey and black tree trunks, 
 whose foliage, though generalized, is finely rendered ; in the distance is a 
 square grey church tower. At the extreme left and top of the canvas, 
 a glimpse of blue sky and golden clouds is seen through and beyond 
 the tree branches. The whole tone and effect of the picture are 
 fascinating in the extreme, and no Gainsborough landscape in the 
 National Gallery dwells in my mind with the same insistence in regard 
 to qualities of drawing, painting, and colour. This picture, indeed, and 
 the one to be presently described, make one regret that hard fate which 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 
 compelled Gainsborough to abandon this walk of art for the portraits 
 which have made his name a household word. 
 
 The second Gainsborough at Sir Charles Tennant's is, like the one 
 just described, an instance of that master's work in landscape and 
 animals which must have had its influence on Morland if anything could, 
 that is, supposing Morland ever saw these two pictures. One white cow 
 and some red or dun cows are silhouetted against a pale grey and white 
 sky. Under the rock, near some water shadowed by it, two fishermen 
 are seated. A fishing-smack is on the right, some way off; in front, on 
 the right, two men are in a boat. It is a very fine example of values and 
 cool tones in white grey and warm russet colour. Had Gainsborough 
 been enabled to achieve many such masterpieces as these two, it is an 
 open question what might have been their effect on Morland's place in 
 the history of English art. 
 
 In three out of the five London houses that I have visited with a view 
 of looking at Morland's pictures only, I have been confronted at the first 
 entrance by a very fine example of the earlier work of James Ward, who 
 was born six years later than Morland, and of whom Morland was, when 
 both were young and Ward little more than a boy, so jealous (as Mr. 
 Hassell says in his biography of Morland) that he would not allow Ward 
 to see him paint. If, as seems probable, these three Wards, one at Mr. 
 Fleming's, one at Mr. Peck's, and the third at Sir Charles Hamilton's, are 
 works produced during Ward's student days and Morland's early prime, 
 there is good reason for the jealousy. At Mr. Fleming's there is a large 
 canvas, by Ward, representing (to take the objects in the order as 
 they strike the eye, which happens to be the order they would do so in 
 nature) a brick-built gable once covered with plaster, the plaster toned to 
 a beautiful ivory-white, and here and there showing the weather-toned 
 red of the bricks — a perfect piece of ivory and toned-red colour — masterly ; 
 then some men, a boat, a dog, grey and silver fish, golden straw, a grey 
 post among the deep-toned grey-green foliage on the left, and (to the 
 right) a glimpse of grey cloud and pure blue-tinted sky. One man in a 
 drab-yellow-reddish slop and trousers hauls a boat up on the left of the 
 picture ; his action is enough and no more. To his right and a little 
 away, near the fish, a white and black dog makes a note of sharp and 
 pleasant contrast with the prevailing golden or misty tone, and it is, in an 
 early manner of Ward's, a little too teased in painting, but no matter. 
 
58 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 On the right is another man, I forget what he is doing, nothing particular 
 probably, in a drab jacket and blue trousers, this blue making a fine note 
 in the harmony of colour. The picture is a masterpiece, and the ivory- 
 white and red gable are the making of it. 
 
 At Sir Charles Hamilton's is another fine Ward, this time not out- 
 door, but the interior of a cow-stable, in which the finely-toned white 
 of the wooden building and the loft above, half light, half shadow, lead up 
 to the highest and brightest light in the picture made by or falling on the 
 flanks of a white cow nearly in the centre but a little to the left of the 
 picture. The toned white is carried through on the hide of a black and 
 white cow lying down to the left of the white one, a dun and white and 
 red cow are beyond her towards the right and further into the picture ; 
 the upper part of the canvas is occupied with the deepening tones of white 
 in shadow, and the deep shadow of the loft above ; pale gold straw 
 hangs over from above, and a grey chaff-cutting machine of primitive 
 make, up in the loft, gives an interest and a culminating point to the 
 design, which is moreover helped out by an old-world basket, for oats 
 probably, this shape f 1 . hung up on the wooden wall on the left and 
 almost in full light. There is a man on the right of the picture, but he 
 only helps out the scheme of greys and drabs, so far as I remember. 
 Another Ward is here, not so fine as a whole, but with great qualities of 
 landscape about it, and not at all in the Morland manner ; the title is 
 given as Coming Storm ; across from the right is a big tree with slanting 
 trunk, painted as Ward knew how, and with all his vigour in divining 
 knots and wrinkles and gnarlings of wood or bark. All the upper 
 branches are blown by the wind, avant-courier of the heavy storm-cloud 
 seen blowing up on the right ; a white bull and some cows stand near, 
 almost under it as if for protection. They stand, however, almost too 
 peaceably, with no sense of rufiie on their hides or of huddling in their 
 movement. 
 
 At Mr. Peck's there is a smaller picture by Ward, different from 
 the two former in general conception of colour and design, but interesting 
 as a piece of clever painting — still life one might almost call it ; for what 
 dwells in the memory is the rendering of a shin of veal, a leg of mutton, 
 and a bullock's heart, the subject being a country butcher's shop. These 
 bits of colour and painting are, however, as lovingly rendered as any 
 Dutchman could have done them, and one wonders what strange twist of 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 
 59 
 
 fate led Ward away from that influence of Morland's, which induced such 
 genuine brush work as this, to the laboured, pretentious, so-called virile 
 manner of his later work, such as Gordale Scar, and the immense 
 canvas of an Alderney bull, cow, and sheep at the National Gallery, as 
 well as the pictures at the South Kensington Museum and elsewhere 
 already alluded to. 
 
 To justify in some degree what has been said with the view of defining 
 George Morland's position in the history of European art, it is necessary 
 to describe a few pictures in private collections whose beauties of painting, 
 drawing, colour, and tone have arrested my attention. Most of these are 
 in London or within a short journey from it. And it may be well to 
 begin by noting a few representative works in Morland's earlier manner, 
 painted between 1786 and 1789 at latest, when he is supposed to have 
 been (perhaps by reason of the French blood in his own veins) more 
 or less under the influence of Watteau and of the later French school 
 of pre-revolutionary date. The girl in Valentines Day — a very fine 
 instance of this manner — has been already described. 
 
 Besides the four pictures (already named) at Mr. Barratt's, which I 
 have not had the opportunity of asking leave to see, and apart from 
 pictures in this genre, mezzotints or other engravings from which are 
 described hereafter, the most noteworthy are two in the possession of 
 Sir Charles Tennant, called Industry and Idleness, a picture called Louisa 
 belonging to Mr. Peck, and alluded to later, and one, also hereafter 
 described, called The Disconsolate, in the possession of Canon Phillips. 
 Two other pictures at Sir Charles Tennant's, Boys robbing an Orchard 
 and Playing at Soldiers, may also well be described now, as both are 
 probably of the same period as the others, and, though much more 
 elaborate and important works, may be classed with the others in regard 
 to the French influence discernible in them. 
 
 The picture at Sir Charles Tennant's, called Industry, is a beautiful 
 scheme of colour, and the drawing, painting, and movement of the face, 
 figure, and hands are fine. A lady in a dark-blue coat or cloak with a 
 white fichu, and wearing a broad-brimmed black hat with a ribbon rosette 
 in front, sits working, apparently at a piece of lace, on a chair with an 
 oval back of a beautiful red. She wears a white dress under the blue 
 cloak or coat, and a red shoe peeps out. She sits fronting a window 
 which is to the left of the picture, and which has a white shutter and a red 
 
6o 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 curtain. Behind her is the wall of the room, a lovely piece of grey tone, 
 with a simple wavy perpendicular pattern. At her elbow is a table of 
 polished reddish-yellow wood, with the leaf down ; and close to the table is 
 a work-basket of white wood, with a miniature on the lid. The carpet is 
 a fine dark blue with crimson spots. The companion picture, called 
 Idleness, is a scheme of whites and greys, perfectly managed, with a warm 
 touch of colour in the reddish-yellow table, with leaf folded down similar 
 to that in Industry. The lady in this picture wears a white gown and 
 mob-cap ; a pale pink ribbon adorns the cap ; on the back of the chair 
 hangs a silver-grey-lined cloak. A spaniel lies to the right, and above it, 
 from the top of the picture, hangs a dark grey curtain, drawn sideways to 
 the right ; and below the curtain the lower corner of a gilt picture frame 
 makes a charming note of colour. The wall here also is of a beautiful 
 grey tone, lighter than the curtain. The painting of the white dress is 
 exquisite, so is that of the face, which is pretty and soulless. 
 
 In Boys robbing an Orchard, the design of which is much the same 
 as that of the coloured mezzotint mentioned later, the drawing, movement, 
 and modelling will challenge comparison with any master, Flemish, 
 Dutch or French, by whom Morland is said to have been influenced, if 
 he was influenced by any one at all. The freedom and unconscious grace 
 of these young rascals, caught in flagrante delicto (by a farmer on the far 
 side of a hedge to the right, who is loosing a bulldog), is wonderfully 
 rendered, and shows what Morland could do with the human figure when 
 he was not drawn away by the fascination that lay for him in the so-called 
 lower animals, pigs, horses, donkeys, and calves. The colour, too, and 
 the management of the foliage, is throughout masterly here. At the 
 right of the picture a boy in a white shirt and light greenish-olive 
 breeches is stooping away from you, his profile almost lost (but his eyes 
 evidently fixed on the farmer and his bulldog under the trees at the 
 extreme right), hastily picking up a brown coat and striped canary and 
 black waistcoat. In the centre of the picture, a little to the left of him, and 
 making a note of white, is a boy in shirt and breeches climbing down an 
 apple tree — the lithe movement is admirably given. Further to the left, 
 but nearly central, is a boy running away, a red-brown coat on his arm, 
 wearing a black hat and a yellowish waistcoat. Still more to the left, a 
 boy in a blue coat kneels, looking at the farmer. To the extreme right 
 of the foreground lies a boy's brown hat lined with blue. On the extreme 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 
 6i 
 
 left of the picture a coppery sunset glows through the trees. These four 
 boys are not peasants, to judge by their faces and dress, but sons of 
 farmers or small gentlefolk, and well-built and good-looking, but not 
 prettyfied as they appear in the mezzotint or stipple engraving afterwards 
 mentioned. The whole picture is finished carefully, without niggling, 
 broad, but complete in treatment ; it is certainly one of the best pictures 
 Morland produced in his earlier manner, similar to that of the French 
 master already alluded to. 
 
 In much the same manner, and painted probably about the same time, 
 is the picture called Playing at Soldiers, in which the design slightly 
 varies from the mezzotint of it at Sir Charles Tennant's, and again from 
 that at the British Museum Print Room, which latter was published in 
 1788, Morland's twenty-fifth year. In the picture, the boy holding the flag 
 (which is red in colour) is the only one who wears a conical cap, probably 
 made of stiff paper. The boy to whom he speaks shoulders a toy musket, 
 and wears a dark drab hat with pink ribbons. He has a sword at his 
 waist and straps or ribbons crosswise round his body. Behind him stands a 
 little girl with curly hair and a white dress. At his left (right of the picture) 
 stands a boy in a black hat and a long white pinafore. The boy at the 
 right of the one with the sword (left of the picture) is kneeling, and 
 wears a brownish-red coat, white collar and pinafore. He also has a 
 musket, but no sword. On the right of the picture is a girl with a drum 
 slung round her, the body of which is painted red ; she wears a white 
 frock. To her left, and right of the picture, is a smaller girl seated, in a 
 straw hat with blue ribbon, a white frock, and a red shoe showing beneath 
 her skirt. This is an extremely fascinating piece of painting and of child 
 movement. She has a doll in her arms, which lie across her lap. On 
 the extreme left of the picture, a nursemaid in a mob-cap and white dress 
 is seated, dandling a baby. An oak tree overshadows the group of boys 
 and girls from the right nearly all across the picture. The foliage and 
 the blue sky and white clouds are finely rendered. All the children look 
 tremendously in earnest, as children do when they are playing at being 
 anything. In the mezzotint of this picture at Sir Charles Tennant's, the 
 boy in the white pinafore wears a conical paper cap instead of a black 
 hat, and holds a musket. 
 
 Among the many fine engravings after Morland at Sir Charles 
 Tennant's are two which may be specially mentioned now, though they 
 
62 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 belong to a later and riper period of Morland's career. One is called 
 Feeding the Pigs. A woman in the centre of the design empties cabbages 
 from her lap to a spotted young pig. The mother sow with two other 
 young pigs is asleep to the left, while a fourth youngster comes grunting 
 towards the woman. At the extreme left of the design is a cock, and 
 near him a dark-coloured horse, harnessed. A tree grows to the right of 
 him and over him. In the centre, behind the woman, and to the left 
 is the gabled roof, steep and thatched, of a stable. To the left of the 
 woman is a white horse, and a man standing at his head, both finely 
 designed and drawn. Another horse's head shows from within the stable. 
 At the right of the design is a man fastening his garter, seated on a 
 wheelbarrow. The woman wears a mob-cap and a ribbon confining it. 
 Behind are rough stakes and some palings, and a shovel to the right. 
 The light falls from the spectator's right on the white horse. This is 
 a very fine example of mezzotint interpretation of Morland's work, and, 
 unlike others mentioned later, is satisfying so far that the colour only is a 
 desideratum. 
 
 An equally fine example of mezzotint at Sir Charles Tennant's is The 
 Happy Cottager, engraved by Joseph Grozer, and published in 1793 by 
 E. B. Evans, London. In this the rendering of the foliage and distance 
 is splendid. In the centre of the composition is a girl wearing a straw 
 hat with a ribbon, a child stands at her side. To the right of these 
 figures a woman enters the cottage behind. Further to the right a boy 
 wheels to the left a barrow in which another boy is seated. On the right 
 in the foreground are ducks in a pond. 
 
 It is interesting to note, apropos of that supposed phase in 
 Morland's painting, during which he saw and sympathized with Watteau's 
 work, that Sir Charles Tennant, who possesses some of the finest 
 examples of that phase of Morland's, also has a beautiful painting by 
 Watteau, very small, of a man and woman (peasants) dancing. This 
 picture is exquisite in values and colour, the peasants are different from 
 Morland's not merely as French differ from English, but in that the 
 picture, like Watteau's more sumptuous and elaborate work, seems a 
 vision from a world of his own, a Decameron story-land. 
 
 Mr. George Salting, among a host of good pictures, especially (as we 
 are talking of Morland) some beautiful Constables and a splendid Crome, 
 has several good paintings by Morland, one of which, the Country Inn 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 63 
 
 (The Grapes), is described in Mr. Richardson's catalogue, and is a 
 very strong example of Morland's best manner, signed and dated 1790. 
 The Alehouse Door, signed and painted two years later, is a small upright 
 picture of two men, one seated, the other standing, in which the quality 
 of painting and the fineness and breadth of drawing and handling are at 
 as high a level as his very best work. 
 
 At the house of Mr. John Fleming, 83, Portland Place, I have seen 
 five pictures by George Morland : two are hunting pieces ; the hounds 
 are all drawn in full profile fore and aft, in the conventional attitude in 
 which running dogs or galloping horses were painted at the last century's 
 end, and with little variety of posture or movement. The first, named 
 Foxhunters leaving a Wayside Inn, in Mr. Richardson's list of Morland 
 paintings, is undated ; the second, called The Death, is signed and dated 
 1803 ; as both are in precisely the same manner and identical in size, one 
 may assign the same date to both, that is, one year before Morland's 
 death. 
 
 The Wagoner buying Vegetables from a Woman with two Children, 
 signed and dated 1797, that is, in his thirty-fourth year, is a noteworthy 
 example of his later time, when his brain and hand, although needing to 
 be spurred by drink, still kept their sturdy originality and power of brush 
 work. The tone of the whole picture has the fascination of a scene 
 descried through light summer mist ; the design and grouping are 
 in Morland's best manner ; the woman's face is comely with the prettiness 
 of youth, but the painter has given us no sense of portraiture. In Mr. 
 Richardson's catalogue the remark is that " the woman is very good- 
 looking, and the wagoner evidently admires her," still we hardly find 
 here much of that unconscious drama which would have forced its way 
 to the attention in a similar subject painted by Clausen or Lepage. 
 
 The small picture, called A. Mare and Foal, the mare dark brown, the 
 foal dark chestnut, is a good instance of tone, where the essentials of 
 drawing and modelling are divined through easy and effortless brush work 
 and intuitive sense of values. The painting of the matted shag in the 
 foal's mane and tail is extremely happy, and the Morland atmosphere is 
 here again delightful. This is an example of Morland's strong time, his 
 twenty-ninth year. The painting is signed and dated 1792. One thing, 
 however, is curious about this picture. At Sir Charles Hamilton's house 
 .(see p. 69) is a picture inferior in handling to the Morland, smaller in 
 
64 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 size, but identical in design, or nearly so, of a mare and foal painted by 
 or attributed to Stubbs. As Stubbs at the date assigned to Morland's 
 picture was nearly seventy, and had been an A.R.A. for twelve years, it 
 seems likely, no date being given to the Stubbs picture, that this latter 
 was painted before Morland's ; if so, the coincidence in design is 
 sufficiently unusual to take some of the charm of originality from 
 Morland in this case, especially as we already know that Morland was 
 a great admirer and probably a student of Stubbs' work. 
 
 The Turnpike Gate or Toll Bar (the latter is Mr. Richardson's, the 
 former Mr. Fleming's title for it) is certainly the finest example of 
 Morland in this collection of Mr. Fleming's. It is signed and dated 
 1793. Mr. Richardson gives no description of it, nor a word of praise, 
 but to my thinking it ranks side by side with Morland's best productions, 
 and appears to have been painted in the artist's thirtieth year. The 
 design is daring, the drawing and modelling are fine and free, the paint is 
 firmly and richly handled. A man, probably a farmer, on a white horse, 
 searches his right-hand pocket for the toll ; the pike-man stands with his 
 back to the spectator at the porch of the toll house ; the rider is dressed 
 in a greyish-drab long coat with a hole in the elbow (capitally rendered) ;. 
 an ash plant is tucked under his arm. The white horse is a big bony 
 brute, fit for any service in harness or saddle ; the head is cut per- 
 pendicularly just below the eye by the porch ; the ears are pricked ; this, 
 bold device helps to give the feeling of space beyond, and a home road to 
 travel. The effect is of a warm summer evening, thin grey clouds and 
 blue-grey sky— a sense of past heat pervades the picture, helped by the 
 branch of oak stuck in the horse's bridle between the ears to keep the 
 flies from teasing ; the hour is too advanced for them to tease now. A 
 third man sits drowsing inside the porch, in deep brown-grey tone (is 
 this possibly a portrait of the artist ? the face resembles his portrait in 
 Hassell's biography). An " ugly customer " sort of bull-terrier stands by 
 the horse's flank, looking suspiciously at the calves of the toll-keeper. He 
 is of a breed rarely seen now, a short-faced bull-terrier, iron-grey with 
 white muzzle and belly ; he looks as if he weighs sixty pounds. An oak 
 tree leans from the left of the spectator, and its branches spread over the 
 whole top of the picture and over the rider and horse, one branch coming 
 down not far above the horse's ears. The rendering of oak-leaf character 
 and of the trunk and bark, is broad and masterly, without scamping. 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 
 65 
 
 Dim red tiles over the toll-gate porch, and warm grey tones among the 
 red and on the porch itself, dark against the late afternoon sky, with 
 touches of grey-green among the tiles, complete a perfect scene of quiet 
 English country life such as comes with keenest relish to a wearied towns- 
 man now-a-days at the end of a long day's journey by rail, when through 
 the still, pure, keen air the suggestion of peat smoke and possible eggs 
 and bacon seems more delicious than the finest promises in scent and 
 taste of a London dining-room. Sir Charles Tennant has a fine 
 mezzotint of The Turnpike Gate, engraved by William Ward. 
 
 Mr. George Harland Peck possesses, at Belgrave Square, a collection 
 of fourteen Morlands, placed among many fine works by the greatest 
 British masters, including a remarkable portrait by Raeburn, a superb 
 Reynolds (Lady Seaforth and her child), and a fine Hoppner. By way 
 of einbarras du choix he has three fine Gainsboroughs, which, in the line 
 Morland later chose as his own, fairly challenge the latter, and at least 
 come abreast of him. Let us speak of the Morlands first. 
 
 In The Laboitrers' Luncheon, a rather small upright picture, signed 
 and dated 1792, there is strong drawing as well as good tone and atmo- 
 sphere. The men are as solidly drawn and smartly painted as those in The 
 Postboys Return. Nothing particular is happening here, and the tree and 
 sky are of the usual grey-green with blue rift. One of the men is in a 
 greyish-white jacket or slop, the other in a red one, and both wear drab 
 knee-breeches. This picture, it may be added, is alluded to in Hassell, 
 and before quoting him I will remark that the pose of the seated labourer 
 is a little strained as to the set of the knees ; Mr. Hassell also says, " The 
 ploughman in his annual new suit would not be equal in picturesque 
 appearance to the same figure when seven or eight months' wear had 
 rendered his covering loose and free ; but as choice depends on taste and 
 the abilities to depict what we see, it may be fairly urged in this instance 
 that Mr. Morland's conception is replete with judgment." I think the 
 breeches and gaiters are a little too new. 
 
 Louisa is a small upright picture of a young girl with an old 
 woman behind her ; there is an indication of stormy sea and sky, and of 
 a wrecked ship ; the painting of the whole is light and charming — just a 
 study in grey, black, and white. The painting is signed and dated 1782. 
 
 In the Washing Day the first thing that one notices is the realistic 
 painting of the kettle in the woman's hand and the steaming, bubbling 
 
66 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 water into which she pours it ; there is a shadowy man in the deep 
 tone of the right side of the picture, dipping up water in a pail ; there is 
 a woman hanging clothes to dry ; there are two children playing ; the 
 overshadowing tree is finely painted both as to trunk and leaves ; but 
 the picture leaves one cold except for that bubbling kettle, and the 
 matronly movement of the woman as she pours. 
 
 The Stable Yard, which Mr. Richardson calls " excellent," appeals to 
 me not because of the painting of the men, nor for the pigs, though they 
 are well enough, but for the masterly painting, drawing, and modelling of 
 the chestnut horse (Mr. Richardson calls it brown, sorrel chestnut is 
 better) ; the toned white of the gable, and the subtle gradations of grey 
 and green tones in the foliage and the thatch, are perfect as a setting. 
 The picture is signed and dated 1791. 
 
 There is at Mr. Peck's a fine engraving of a stiff brown or bay pony, 
 led or held, I think, by a man (a butcher, Mr. Peck suggests), and a 
 woman is, I think, giving a dram to the man, a bull-terrier is there too — 
 where is the original picture ? 
 
 The Woodcutters and the Gipsies are rather sketches in oil than 
 finished pictures. 
 
 The next two pictures in this house (taking them in the order of my 
 notes) are called Children Fishing and The Market Cart. Taking the 
 last first, here again is a picture that shows you so much more than 
 the eye can see. I know that deep lane going down hill ; the hill, I know, 
 will increase in pitch of steepness, to be followed by a steep up-grade ; I 
 am tired and muddy and hungry and wish almost — but for pride's sake — 
 that a lift could be had in that jolting boneshaker. How one feels the 
 movement and sees the patient yield of the backs of the man and woman 
 as a more than usually vicious rut — they were ruts in those days — drops 
 one wheel near to upsetting the cart. Here Morland has got his effect 
 by cutting off the greater part, the lower part of the horse, the movement 
 is by this device rendered so much the more vivid ; the run of the dog 
 helps it. There is an oak, as usual, painted in a convincing way. The 
 picture is initialed. 
 
 The Children Fishing is, with one important reservation, a chef-d^oeuvre. 
 It represents a boy of about nine or ten and a girl a year or more 
 younger ; the boy holds a stick, to one end of which is tied a string, 
 the string has a hook and on the hook is a small fish ; the girl, who 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 67 
 
 is seated with her back to you, in a white frock and red shoes, stretches 
 one chubby hand to the fish, to get hold of it. All charming, bold paint- 
 ing, thorough finish. It is a delicious nook of clear water (too clear, one 
 would think, for an angler), a peep of distance beautifully rendered. At 
 the right side of the canvas, but beyond the figures, is the barked trunk of 
 an oak, splendidly realized in a few strokes. But — I grieve to say it — the 
 boy is not a boy. He never was ; he never will be. He is a Pecksniff 
 in small clothes. This is the more strange, since the girl-child is a perfect 
 piece of innocent childhood. The picture is signed but undated. 
 
 There is a Coast Scene with a fine sky, the usual grey and blue rift, 
 and sea tumbling rather in a Morland manner ; it is initialed. There is a 
 Pig-sty, a larger work, unsigned and undated. 
 
 In this collection there is an early work, either No. 5 or No. 13 in Mr. 
 Richardson's list, which I liked better than Mr. Peck appeared to do, and 
 in the Richardson list No. 5 is described as " a rather stiff early work, 
 very carefully painted," while No. 13 is described as "in bad condition." 
 Anyhow, I only saw, or remember, one of these, in which a man and dog 
 are a note in the picture. Here the foliage is certainly carefully but 
 broadly painted, and the character of the oak leaves is very thoroughly 
 given. It is only now and then that deep foliage is so satisfactorily 
 interpreted by Morland in his later work, so far as I have seen ; in 
 The Tttrnpike Gate, for instance (at Mr. Fleming's). 
 
 The remaining three pictures at Mr. Peck's are. The Quarry, signed 
 (No. 3, Richardson), Forest Scene or Glade (No. 5 or 13), and The 
 Fisherman s Toast (No. 6). These three are not specially noticeable, 
 except as good examples of Morland's ease in arrangement and mastery 
 of tone. 
 
 So much for Mr. Peck's Morlands; and, strictly speaking, here ends my 
 screed. But it is impossible to avoid noting a strange fancy that attracted 
 me in going through the rooms. Brought up before that beautiful Reynolds, 
 two fine Hoppners, and three undeniable Gainsborough landscapes, all of 
 them if not cheek by jowl, at all events in the same room, under the same 
 roof, within earshot of each other, so to say, one thinks involuntarily of the 
 ghosts of these and the other dead masters haunting their living handiwork, 
 in the early morning light before the housemaids are astir in the summer- 
 time, spirits hobnobbing and colloguing together, forgetful of old social 
 differences, past jealousies possibly, and sometimes sadly warped and wrong 
 
68 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 lives here. Morland's washerwoman is heedless as any royal duchess of her 
 ladyship of Seaforth on the other wall, and Landseer's stag, alert and 
 rough hided, in Richmond Park perhaps, is equally at ease among 
 Hoppner's fine gentlefolk, and holds his place as an aristocrat among 
 animals. Among these the stately Gainsborough landscapes stand 
 serene ; all these works of undegraded English gentlemen are at ease 
 with the fancies, as fine in their way, of the poor daemon-ridden gentleman 
 from whom his vanity and headlong hedonism drop like an old garment, 
 as his spirit meets theirs on equal terms. Is it democracy in art, or is it 
 aristocracy asserting itself at last through all rags and defilement ? 
 
 Of Mr. Peck's three Gainsborough landscapes, one may be specified 
 as similar in title to one of Morland's there (it is called, I think. The 
 Market Cart), though it is totally different in treatment. There is a 
 group in and round the cart, a boy kneeling and a dog drinking at some 
 water in deep shadow on the right of the picture. The treatment of the 
 rocks and the grey stormy sky is very pure and free, the deeper tones are 
 richer and darker than Morland usually cared to produce, but none the 
 less there is an affinity of soul between the two painters. 
 
 At Sir Charles Hamilton's house and in his possession elsewhere, 
 the Morlands are very distinguished and interesting. The first on my 
 notes is called simply Sea Coast, Men and Boats, No. 5 in Mr. Richardson's 
 list of Sir Charles Hamilton's pictures. Here the grouping and movement, 
 as well as the firm painting of the men, is in Morland's best and highest 
 manner. All the men have red caps, which clinch the scheme of colour, 
 one in a dark-blue coat with a cape is lighting a pipe ; a boat grounded 
 gives a beautiful toned white value. The sky is grey and white cloud, 
 stormy, with blue shining through a grey film. In the left centre of the 
 picture rippling waves give a steely grey light fading into dark to the 
 almost unseen horizon ; warm coloured sand makes up the scheme of a 
 work full of the heedless passion and joy of life, the sharp sweetness 
 of salt sea air. 
 
 I noticed next a picture singularly like Morland's work, but painted by 
 Shayer. It is a fine work, and a triumphant instance of how little a great 
 name matters, for in all the essentials of painting this is as good as many 
 a Ward or Morland at their best. It is just a group of women, an old 
 man seated smoking, two other men, middle-aged, with a child, at the 
 same table ; by them is a boy mounted on a white pony, in a blue jean 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 69 
 
 frock, holding a butcher's tray with joints of meat on it. A tree over- 
 shadows the whole on the right. There is no example of this painter in 
 the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square, nor in the Louvre, nor at the 
 South Kensington Museum. 
 
 Next was pointed out a picture, a landscape of trees rather stiffly 
 painted and yet with a sense of foliage clear cut against the sky, green, 
 russet, and grey being the prevailing tones. The main wood of trees is on 
 the left of the spectator ; on the right the ground falls away and tall stems 
 of young ash spring up and out of the canvas, delicately felt and drawn. 
 Under the trees is a donkey ; more to the right, on the path, and outside of 
 the trees, a man tries to kiss a girl. The landscape is by Julius Caesar 
 Ibbetson, the figures are by Morland, and very capitally painted. Little 
 is said of Morland's association with Ibbetson in any of the four early 
 lives of Morland, though there is an allusion to Ibbetson in Hassell's 
 biography ; and both Wheatley and Ibbetson appear to have had associa- 
 tion with and therefore probably some influence over Morland in his 
 younger days. 
 
 Next to notice rapidly are No. 3 in Mr. Richardson's list, called 
 Cottage, Donkey^ and Boy : Snow Scene, in which the main features are 
 a woman in a red cloak, a man in a blue coat with cape, drinking, and 
 a crop-eared donkey with a boy on it, a white dog with yellow rump and 
 eyebrow near by ; the cottage thatch and ground are powdered with 
 snow ; the dog's toned white against the snow is well managed. There is 
 the usual blue rift in the grey clouds. Of the Mare and Foal by Stubbs 
 I have spoken in connection with the Mare and Foal by Morland in Mr. 
 Fleming's possession (see pp. 63, 64). This of Sir Charles Hamilton's is 
 not a remarkable Stubbs in any way. There are two pictures of a boy, 
 cow, and sheep, by Morland, and a winter scene, neither of which are 
 mentioned in Mr. Richardson's list. But in connection with the Mor- 
 lands and Wards at Sir Charles Hamilton's or in his possession, it comes 
 naturally at this point to speak of a very fine picture by the elder Herring, 
 a straw-yard with horses and cattle, etc., in which one sees an evolutionary 
 advance as regards sensitiveness to form ; the drawing of the horses in 
 particular is much more refined though not more masterly than that of 
 Morland ; the breed chosen is not so big boned ; the painting of the roof 
 of the shed, the grey beams, the middle distance, and the rails that bound 
 the enclosure, are all thoughtfully rendered, and the whole feeling of the 
 
70 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 picture is one of air and space such as is rare in my acquaintance with 
 Herring's work, which is generally mannered and tea-boardy. 
 
 Sir Charles Hamilton, however, possesses three very remarkable 
 Morlands, which require a fuller notice. For my own personal taste the 
 very finest of the three is the smallest and apparently least important, but 
 (to allude for a moment to the commercial side) if any one with the true 
 painter's vision were to see it, say at Christie's, he would be justified in 
 running it up to as high a price as has yet been obtained for a Morland. 
 This picture is not in Mr. Richardson's list, and is simply called Gipsies. 
 But it is separated by the width of heaven from the Gipsies in Mr. 
 Peck's collection. My notes describe it as a very fine Morland, called 
 Gipsies ; there is merely a group of a man, woman, and child in a wood ; 
 the man, black-haired and with a tanned gipsy face of the aquiline type, 
 sits near a large cooking-pot over a fire ; he is dressed in drab, with knee- 
 breeches and gaiters, and a child is seated on his knee ; the child has a 
 white mob-cap and red shawl, and its face is turned away from the 
 spectator. The group is settled under a large oak whose trunk leans from 
 the left of the picture ; there are glimpses of blue sky through the flicker 
 of leaves overhead ; the prevailing tone is grey, green, and russet. 
 Nothing unusual or unlooked-for in all this, and the canvas is not more 
 than eighteen inches by sixteen inches oblong. But the sense of wild, 
 free, forest life, the rough caress of the breeze that pervades the picture, 
 the loneliness and perfect irresponsible happiness of the scene, are such 
 as perhaps none but Morland could have realized. Here are vagrants 
 ptir sang, wild creatures of the heath and wood — " There is the wind on 
 the heath, brother," — and the firm, rapid brush work, never a touch too 
 many, the perfect rendering of the oak trunk and foliage, the value of the 
 black head of the male gipsy, the red shawl of the child, and the grey 
 black of the pot, all combine to make a perfect picture of a mood beloved 
 of its painter, nay, a picture to turn us all vagrants for the nonce. I don't 
 know the date, but it is probably about 1791. 
 
 Another fine Morland, a good deal larger, is called Shrimpers, No. 2 
 in Mr. Richardson's list. Here the sky is the arresting feature, a fair blue 
 space with soft white clouds, full of sweet and moving air from the sea. 
 There is a man in a red jersey with a shrimping-net, a dog (a retriever) 
 well indicated, a boy in a blue jacket, and cliffs in tone beyond to the 
 right ; in the foreground to the right, a post with a crosspiece, on which 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 
 71 
 
 hang ropes and a dead conger eel. But the making of the picture is the 
 sky space and its true relation to the grey water and warmer-toned sand 
 of the foreground. 
 
 The third Morland of considerable interest belonging to Sir Charles 
 Hamilton is the Cornish Plunderers. This picture is signed but undated. 
 It is described by Hassell in his life of Morland, and is nearly as large as 
 the chef-d'oeuvre in the National Gallery, of a Stable, 2SiA as widely 
 separated as may be from that work in inspiration and motive. The first 
 thing to note about it is that the whole middle of the picture is occupied 
 with a steep-roofed thatched cottage standing close to the sea, its door 
 facing the spectator and away from the sea ; above is a dark, wind-blown, 
 grey cloud-sky with blue rift. The whole effect of this inarticulate piece 
 of man's and nature's work is sinister, as if for once nature were leagued 
 with the human beasts of prey which lurk about the foreground. The 
 spars and mast of the wrecked ship they have lured to its destruction are 
 seen above the rocks on the left. Near the door of the hut stands a 
 woman in a red shawl, white bed-gown and blue skirt ; a dog, grey and 
 white, lounges near. A man in white jacket and cap is in the centre 
 of the picture near the woman. More to the right a man in a dark-blue coat 
 is prizing open a wooden chest. On the left a man in a long drab 
 coat stoops over a large open trunk, half-full ; some of its contents, notice- 
 able a yellow and black striped waistcoat, a pair of top-boots, red coat and 
 blue military cloak, are tossed on the sand. The gold hilt of a sword 
 peeps from the linen in the trunk. Men in the centre are unpacking 
 black-green glass bottles, probably containing Hollands, from a straw-filled 
 wooden case. Bales on the left of the picture, on one of them the 
 signature G. Morland. The reds in the picture are carried through 
 by the misty red of the hut's chimney above. 
 
 I note two other pictures : one of a donkey and pig, with the usual blue 
 and grey sky, the whole fine in colour, drawing, and effect ; the other of 
 sheep, snow-clad trees, a man bringing straw, and a man at the left in a rough 
 drab coat with a sheep-hook in his hand. In this picture the relative values 
 of the snow, the yellow of the sheep's fleece, and the drab of the 
 man's coat, are finely given. 
 
 Not the least interesting of these Morland treasures is a portfolio, 
 or rather large book, containing sketches and drawings, mostly in pencil, 
 one or two in pen and ink, by Morland. Several pages in the book are 
 
72 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 taken up, oddly enough, with what appear to be notes of lectures on 
 astronomy and meteorology, said to be in Morland's handwriting, but 
 evidently written in his manhood. There are three pages showing leaf- 
 and-branch growths of oak and hawthorn ; there is another drawing of a 
 man, probably a fisherman, in apron and smock, kneeling and handling a 
 large fish, a basket at his foot. Another is a woman in a mob-cap with 
 her arms folded. Another, a man in jacket and ragged breeches and 
 stockings, with remnants of boots showing his bare toes, pours pigwash 
 from a bucket into a tub ; a pig's head is faintly indicated to the right. 
 This drawing is full of character and movement. In another drawing 
 a horse rubs his head against a tree (there is an etching from this 
 drawing in the Print Room of the British Museum, as mentioned later) ; 
 there are several capital drawings in pure outline of young pigs' heads, 
 horned rams, and sheep, and one of a short-faced bull-terrier's head. 
 
 At Sir Walter Gilbey's house, Elsenham Hall, among other fine 
 Morlands, is one called Wreckers, probably painted about the same time 
 as the picture in Sir Charles Hamilton's possession, called Cornish 
 Plunderers, but, like that picture, undated. The sky is finely painted, with 
 heavy clouds and blue-grey sky ; the picture is full of air and movement, 
 of the plunge of breakers, the sound of wind. Somewhat to the left are a 
 group of men and a woman. She, in a black bonnet and dull red cloak, 
 looks out to sea ; a man in a red cap kneels on a rock ; other men haul in 
 a spar to which a rope is fastened ; in the centre are two boys on a brown 
 horse, one standing on the horse's back ; to the right of these figures are 
 bales, and a rough white dog with brown patches on his head ; near by a 
 man in a buff smock is loading up a cart, while two men, one in a red 
 jacket, the other in a long blue coat, carry two boxes, the upper one a sea- 
 chest. A man in a red cap and brown-drab coat and trousers stoops 
 over a bale at the left. There are grey-white chalk cliffs to the right 
 covered with grey-green grass at the top. 
 
 In The Death of the Fox, signed but undated, the principal interest 
 lies in a big grey hunter, dismounted, which has evidently been ridden by 
 the huntsman who stands cheering the pack. This horse is a large- 
 boned weight-carrier, of a type seldom seen now-a-days, and is almost the 
 only instance I know of a high-bred horse painted by Morland. He is of 
 the sort described by " Nimrod," I think, as a "thorough-bred wagon 
 horse." The huntsman and the two whips wear black caps very like 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 
 73 
 
 those of to-day. The other riders in high-collared buff coats, and hats of 
 truncated cone shape with curling brims, wear top-boots, like the 
 huntsman and two whips who are in scarlet. This picture was probably 
 painted about the same date (1790) as the picture near it, called 
 The Fox Inn. 
 
 There are here, however, four or five pictures, differing in subject, 
 showing Morland in his best and most versatile moods. 
 
 The Dram is the first to be mentioned, and perhaps the most complete 
 work, taken altogether, as well as the most vivid presentment of a piece of 
 perfectly commonplace life, either in this or any other collection I have 
 seen. The canvas is upright ; there is the usual grey cloud and blue 
 sky ; a grey-white wall is on the left and centre of the picture, in the wall 
 a door with the sign of a black lion above it ; next to the door is a 
 penthouse covered with grey-green moss and tiles or thatch ; the roof is 
 deep pitched. Steps lead up to the door ; on the top step stands a woman 
 in a blue petticoat and white bed-gown, a pale yellow kerchief round 
 her neck and shoulders fichu-wise ; she pours liquor from a black bottle 
 into a glass, and in front of her, his foot on the top step, stands a man, 
 waiting for the dram. He is dressed in a yellowish-white smock, a black 
 hat, breeches, and stockings. On the bottom step sits a woman in 
 a white petticoat, dark grey bodice and red cloak, a white kerchief 
 round her head. She nurses a barefooted child ; another child stands 
 near her to her left with its hands on the step ; a white bundle with a 
 rough staff thrust through it lies by the seated woman's foot. In front of 
 her sits a black dog somewhat to the right of the picture. In the 
 distance to the right is a field, a church spire, and a red-roofed house. 
 
 That is all ; but, as in Lepage's work, according to Mr. Clausen, 
 Morland leaves you to imagine. He gives you the scene, and gives no 
 clue to the connection, any or none, between the man about to drink and 
 the woman with her two youngsters. She looks a casual trampish sort, 
 she half turns her head to see the drinking — looks as if she would like 
 some too, but had not much hope of getting it. Her face is roughened 
 and brazen, but young, her pose is free and strong, as of a woman 
 accustomed to walking long distances, to sitting on hedge-banks, to 
 roughing it generally. Her frame is strong, so is that of her children ; 
 the man seems a respectable carter or farmer, to whom the dog belongs. 
 Every figure in the picture is finely painted and carefully drawn. 
 
74 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 According to Hassell's description the woman is the man's wife. The 
 pose of the child standing by its mother is beautifully simple and childlike ; 
 the little one in her arms is not so happily conceived. The picture is 
 signed but undated ; however, as a mezzotint engraving from it, by William 
 Ward, was published in 1 796, it can hardly have been painted earlier than 
 Morland's thirtieth or later than his thirty-second year. 
 
 Another fine picture here is called Postboys and Horses. There is a 
 finely-painted white horse, in full profile, feeding in a manger to the 
 right ; a saddle, etc., lie on the ground to the right again. On the left are 
 three men, one in a waistcoat and white shirt-sleeves drinking ; another, 
 in buff jacket, breeches, and top-boots, sits on a basket. To the extreme 
 left, behind a barrel, is a man in a red jacket, and in front of the barrel a 
 pitch-fork and a dog, in tone. This picture is signed and dated 1794. 
 
 There are two pictures called Gipsy Encampment, one signed G. 
 Morland, J. Rathbone, the other signed G. Morland, 1791. This latter 
 is a telling example of Morland's sympathy with woodland life and the 
 wild men who lived in it ; and although larger, attracts me by the 
 same qualities that 1 have spoken of in Sir Charles Hamilton's picture, 
 Gipsies. On the left is a sleeping man in a grey smock, with a yellow 
 and white spaniel asleep close to him ; the slackened limbs, the sense of 
 utter rest in both, is wonderful. The man is scarcely more human than 
 the dog, whose fore-shortening, as he lies over and away on his side, is 
 masterly. Near by is a woman in a red cloak and a grey skirt with a bit 
 of blue apron showing ; three sticks are placed tripod-wise in the centre, or 
 rather to the right. On the right is a man with a black iron pot in his 
 hand ; his back is towards you ; he wears a grey- white smock ; he leans 
 his right hand against an oak branch ; the oak tree overshadows the whole 
 picture. The sleeping man and spaniel lie against a bank overhung by 
 the outer branches of the oak. A fire smoulders under the three sticks. 
 The whole picture makes you feel that these are folk who would stifle under 
 a roof, whose whole being is made of sunshine, rain, bright frost, snow, and 
 mists, who are one with the heath, with the road, with the forest trees. 
 Tramps, idlers, thieves it may be, but they are the hardest workers in the 
 world except the drunkards. 
 
 Gathering Sticks is a small picture, but a gem. No painter has excelled 
 the feeling of deep wild woodland in this work, — miles of it there may be : 
 it is a prophecy of Rousseau, who indeed has never painted anything finer 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 
 75 
 
 in his line. The treatment of the foliage is free from carelessness, but not 
 laboured ; the leaves move ; the split trunk is a splendid piece of 
 handling. The girl in a red shawl or cape and blue-grey skirt, the white 
 bundle, and the man (or boy) in shirt-sleeves and buff short coat or 
 waistcoat, help out the scheme of colour, and brighten the greys, russets, 
 and greens. This painting is signed and dated 1791. 
 
 The two pictures called, one Pheasant Shooting and the other Partridge 
 Shooting, are each fine in treatment, perhaps mainly interesting 
 historically to sportsmen as compared with the shooting picture of to- 
 day. No stubble, no battue ; in Pheasant Shooting there are two men 
 each with a gun, one in a scarlet coat, drab breeches, white stockings, 
 and lace-up boots, the other in dark dress of the same kind but with 
 gaiters. On the left a keeper or keeper's boy leans against a gate, a 
 peasant in a white smock is on the other side of the gate. The man in 
 scarlet is firing at a cock pheasant, which flies not four yards from the 
 gun muzzle, and is apparently clean missed. Two spaniels, one liver 
 coloured, one white and liver, run barking after the pheasant. The 
 silvery white smoke from the gun makes a note of colour with the scarlet 
 against the dark russet foliage. In Partridge Shooting the sportsman 
 wears the same dress but is mounted on a stiff shooting pony, black- 
 brown, with white face and white hind-legs. The painting of the man's 
 pony is first-rate ; the drawing of both, and the seat of the man, are also 
 first-rate. In the middle distance are a shed, a cart, and some burning 
 rubbish. There are two pointers, one liver, the other white with liver 
 patch on head and back. A brace of partridges flies (unhurt) on the 
 extreme left. In both these pictures the painting is masterly throughout. 
 Both these pictures are unsigned and undated ; but from their manner 
 and from the fact that a pair of pictures of the same subjects, formerly in 
 the possession of the late Charles F. Huth, Esq., were etched by 
 Rowlandson in 1790, we may fairly assign Sir Walter Gilbey's two 
 paintings to Morland's twenty-fifth year. 
 
 In the Deserters Farewell, three soldiers, armed, are seizing (or 
 rather one of them is seizing) the deserter ; his wife flings her arms round 
 his neck. The man looks a mere booby, built for an athlete ; the wife is 
 a masterpiece of drawing and painting, and the love and despair of her 
 movement are expressed with the greatest pathos and reticence at the 
 same time. This is the one instance I have seen where Morland has let 
 
76 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 himself go in a full expression of passionate emotion, and he has not let 
 himself go too far. The tone of the woman's white gown, the drab of the 
 man's dress, and the red of the soldier's uniform harmonize finely, and the 
 painting of the woman's gown fulfils Mr. Dawe's wish, it is as finely felt 
 as the drapery of a Greek statue. The painting is signed and dated 1792. 
 
 In Innocence Alarmed, or The Flash in the Pan, the main thing to 
 note is the good drawing and action of the startled pointer, the action of 
 the child is inadequate for alarm ; the tone of the whole is fine however, 
 and the servant in white bodice and blue skirt who kneels at the fire- 
 place breaking sticks is well rendered. An engraving of this picture by 
 J. R. Smith, junr., was published in 1803 ; the manner of the painting, 
 however, leads one to assign it a date several years earlier. 
 
 The Rev. Canon Phillips has at Cobham a collection of upwards of 
 fifty pictures by Morland, of which, for want of space, only a few can be 
 specified. The first noted is a copy, by Allen, from Morland's portrait of 
 Mr. Wm. Phillips, Canon Phillips' father, with his Newfoundland dog, 
 Friend, which saved him from drowning (see Mr. Richardson's list). The 
 pose and solidity of the figure are well given. 
 
 The Blmd White Horse is a very fine example in colour, drawing, and 
 tone. The open-air effect is well rendered. A young man in drab 
 jacket is driving the horse from the stable on the left towards a wooden 
 trough, or manger on trestles, in which a brown-bay horse has his nose 
 buried. Two pigs lie to the right of the picture. Both horses are finely 
 drawn, particularly the action and lifted head of the blind one. The 
 picture is signed but undated. 
 
 The Sto7^m is a grandly-conceived land and seascape : the sea beats on 
 a rocky coast to the left. Men haul up a boat ; bales of goods lie about ; 
 a wreck is breaking up in the middle distance ; a ship under double- 
 reefed sails, and a small lugger, are under the shelter of the chalk cliffs in 
 middle distance. The movement and air in the sky are splendidly done, 
 the air is full of rain, there is a torn rift of blue sky ; the painting of the 
 waves is far finer, in the rendering of breakers rolling in under stress of 
 wind, than any of Morland's work in this line that I have seen. This 
 painting is signed and dated 1 790. 
 
 There is an interesting portrait (by himself) of Morland in a blue coat 
 and red waistcoat, seated near an open door, at which stands a man, a horse's 
 head appearing behind him. By Morland is a white and yellow spaniel. 
 
EXAMPLES OF MORLAND'S WORK 
 
 77 
 
 The handling is not so good as some of Morland's work. Much better 
 painted is the portrait of Morland's man Simpson in dark-blue coat, brown 
 under-vest or under-coat, and dark red waistcoat, standing in the open air 
 by a tree. 
 
 There is a finely suggestive picture, one of two called Savernake, 
 showing a beautifully painted hollow tree-trunk and russet foliage ; a 
 woman and a boy are gathering sticks, a chalky bank is on the right. A 
 man near the hollow trunk pulls down a branch. 
 
 The Day after the Wreck shows fine movement in a number of men 
 across the picture hauling wreckage from left to right ; one of the finest 
 pieces of vigorous action painted by Morland. A man in a white jacket 
 and red cap is handling bales on the right ; the toned white of the cliff 
 contrasts finely with the blue rift against which one pale, cold cloud lifts 
 itself ; the sea, too, is finely painted. This picture is signed but undated ; 
 it was exhibited at Burlington House in 1870. 
 
 The Disconsolate and her Parrot, a portrait of Mrs. Morland, is a 
 beautiful little study of a lady in a blue dress, lighted by a window from 
 the left ; it is signed but undated, and was probably painted in Morland's 
 twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year, i. e. about the date of the two pictures. 
 Industry and Idleness at Sir Charles Tennant's, and already described. 
 
 There is exquisite tone and colour in the picture called The Stable 
 Yard, signed but not dated, and probably painted between 1790 and 1792. 
 A finely-drawn white horse, and a brown, are standing together ; a brown 
 horse lies down in front. There is a man in a red jacket; golden straw 
 makes a rich note of colour. 
 
 A picture called The Ferry-Boat is new in treatment, four men being 
 silhouetted darkly against a sky of copper and blue, the ferry-boat 
 pushing off over dimly-lighted water. Another near it shows some cattle 
 under trees, a man and child going away, a blue sky with white clouds ; 
 very fine in painting, and in the effect of warm summer air. 
 
 There is also a charming but very small picture of a wagon drawn by 
 two horses tandem, the shaft horse chestnut, the leader white, an over- 
 hanging cliff on the right. The whole thing is very slight, but full of air, 
 and the drawing and colour of the horses, though so slight, is masterly. 
 
 In Feeding the Calves, the painting and drawing of the calves is capital; 
 the girl feeding them wears a low-necked dress with blue sleeves and a 
 dark-blue skirt. Another small but very fine picture, is a girl on the 
 
78 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 sea-shore on a windy day. The girl is in a red cloak, blue petticoat or apron 
 and white under-petticoat. A little boy is with her, a dog follows her. 
 The movement of the boy and girl against the wind is given in a very 
 fascinating way. Chalk cliffs are in the distance ; the tone of the whole 
 is fine. The picture is signed but undated. 
 
 2. Some Mezzotints, Etchings and Engravings after Morland. 
 
 In the Print Room at the British Museum there are very few original 
 drawings by Morland ; one is a particularly fine one, in its delicacy and 
 keen sensitiveness to form, though done with very few lines and probably 
 with great sureness and rapidity of hand. It is in pencil, and represents 
 a greyhound couched ; the construction (the charpente and anatomy) is 
 felt but not insisted on, and there is nothing in this way, of any date, to 
 surpass it. It is unsigned and undated, but (see my note presently on 
 the etching from it) was probably done in 1791 or 1792. There are also 
 two fine rough sketches, one of two horses under a big oak tree, the other 
 of a pointer dog, in the act of pointing game ; his body is right to left, the 
 head is turned round left to right. This is signed very faintly G. 
 Morland," but undated. 
 
 Lastly, there is a good chalk drawing, the face slightly tinted, of John 
 Raphael Smith, the engraver, publisher (and I believe painter as well), 
 who reproduced and published so many of Morland's works. He wears, 
 a low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat ; he has mutton-chop whiskers, and 
 is otherwise clean shaven ; the face is well covered, jovial in expression, 
 but keen looking It is unsigned and undated. 
 
 Morland's popularity, like that of Landseer, was very largely 
 increased by, if not dependent on, the vast number of the mezzotints, 
 plain and in colours, stipple and line engravings, and etchings, executed 
 and published during his life and after his death. Now-a-days these 
 Landseer engravings are not much run after, while engravings (using the 
 word to include all the methods mentioned) after Morland are treasured, 
 and where possible eagerly bought, their prices varying from five guineas 
 to three figures sometimes. It must be confessed that apart from the 
 taste of the connoisseur in the various forms of engraving, and his 
 knowledge in regard to fine impressions, it is difficult to admit the value 
 of any but the finest of these reproductions, either as works of art or as 
 
SOME MEZZOTINTS, ETC., AFTER MORLAND 79 
 
 interpretations of Morland's painting ; while in the case of Landseer, 
 the engravings and etchings after his paintings or drawings are not only in 
 themselves fascinating as works of art, but they are in most instances 
 so fine an interpretation as to give us something more than the original 
 picture does, something which the painter may have felt, but which he 
 failed to realize on canvas. 
 
 In nearly every case where I have seen an original painting or 
 drawing by Morland, and then a mezzotint, stipple, or other reproduction 
 from it, the absence in the latter of any individuality of handling, of effect, 
 of atmosphere has been noteworthy. Again, though the mezzotint or 
 stipple be in colour, it has none of the individual charm of Morland's own 
 palette, but is just a more or less prettified, softened shadow of the 
 painting ; it has none of the free and sometimes reckless vigour which we 
 find in Morland's best painting, and if it be an etching from a drawing in 
 outline, much of the fineness and the delicate sensitiveness to form is 
 lost. This is noticeably the case in the etching of a greyhound couched, 
 published by Harris in 1793, and signed " G. Morland, 1792." This is 
 done evidently from the original drawing (unsigned and undated) which I 
 have described above. 
 
 Of the etchings (mostly from outline drawings) to be seen at the Print 
 Room, besides some of horses, goats, pigs, cows, calves, and sheep, to be 
 more particularly noticed presently, there are four or five men and children, 
 the original drawings of which, judging from the greyhound already 
 mentioned, must be exquisite examples of Morland's mastery in the 
 rendering of movement by pure line. One represents a man in jacket or 
 jersey, breeches and stockings, seated astride on a chair, his arms folded 
 along the back of it, his head resting on his arms, the face hidden. 
 Another gives us a stoutish man, seated dozing in a chair, dressed in 
 coat, breeches, and stockings ; his head leans over supported by his 
 right hand, the left arm is thrown over the back of the chair, the forearm 
 hanging. In both these examples the movement and realization of 
 form is admirably rendered in a few lines only. Both are signed 
 " G. Morland, 1794." 
 
 Perhaps the etching which most makes one long to see the original 
 is a small one, on a sheet containing several, of a small girl child in frock 
 and pinafore, on all fours, the elbows on the ground, looking at some 
 small object among weeds. The etching is a perfect and fascinating bit of 
 
8o 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 child nature, and the possessor of the original drawing should be a happy- 
 person. Morland has succeeded in giving here (what in painting children 
 he sometimes lost) the complete spontaneity of childhood, the absorption 
 in a world of its own, freedom and animal-like unconsciousness in 
 movement. On the same sheet is another child, seated on a stool with 
 her back to you, also a marvel of drawing, though less fascinating than 
 the former. But in both these cases one feels that much of the charm 
 of the actual drawing has been lost in the etching and printing. These 
 etchings are signed " G. Morland, 1792." There is a good etching by 
 Baldrey of a man pulling a rope, published by Harris, 1792. The man 
 shows more energy than do most of Morland's men. Published by 
 Harris in 1793 are two capital etchings from drawings of men; one 
 seated on the front of a cart driving, his right arm stretched, cracking 
 a whip — the rough movement of the cart, the trot of the horse, though 
 not actually seen, are divined through the skill in presenting the man. 
 The other shows a resting yokel, in a smock, breeches, stockings, and 
 shoes, cutting bread and chef,se (probably) in his hands. Both these 
 are signed " G. Morland, 1793." 
 
 In 1794 Harris publishes an etching from a good drawing of a cart- 
 horse rubbing his head against a tree ; it is pretty evident that the 
 original is the one already mentioned, belonging to Sir Charles Hamilton. 
 In 1793 the same publisher gives an etching of a man's foot and ankle 
 with a skate on, and a very slight sketch (small) on the same paper of 
 a man skating, and another skater who has fallen prone on the ice. 
 These are signed " G. Morland, 1792." On the same paper is a well- 
 drawn profile head of a man in a three-cornered hat ornamented with 
 oak leaves or a rosette. 
 
 Another etching published by Harris, 1792, and signed G. M., 1792, 
 is done from what must be an exceedingly good drawing in line and move- 
 ment, of a man with his back to you, stooping to lift a round-topped trunk 
 or box. He is in a tailed coat, breeches, and stockings. 
 
 On the same sheet with the greyhound couched are two other 
 pretty drawings of children, one fast asleep, the other seated and leaning 
 over away from you. Also another good drawing of a man pulling a rope. 
 All these are etched by J. Baldrey, and published by Harris in 1792. 
 
 Of animals, there are in the Print Room several etchings from 
 outline drawings ; among those marked anonymous (as to publisher's 
 
SOME MEZZOTINTS, ETC., AFTER MORLAND 8i 
 
 name), are some good heads of cattle, unsigned, some hind-quarters and 
 heads of horses also drawn with a fine feeling of construction, signed 
 " G. Morland, 1794," some fine goats' and calves' heads, and a spirited 
 drawing of a pointer under a gnarled oak, head to the left. 
 
 I note also on one sheet drawings of heads, and different parts of 
 pointers and spaniels, and one very slight but very clear drawing of 
 a pointer running ; the gallop is capitally rendered. These are signed 
 " G. Morland, 1791," and published in 1806 by Reeve. 
 
 Of the etchings from outline drawings of animals, some are by 
 Baldrey, of pigs, sheep, goats, spaniel's head, and calf's head, the 
 fore-shortening of the latter very well given. These are signed " G. 
 Morland, 1799." Another sheet has some good drawings of heads and 
 quarters of horses in harness. Both these sheets, like the other Baldrey 
 etchings mentioned above, are published by Harris in 1792. 
 
 Among other etchings (published by Harris) of animals, are three 
 heads of sheep carried further in point of finish than some others, and 
 the texture of the short fleece is well given. They are signed 
 " George Morland," without a date. There is also a fine pure outline- 
 drawing of the forehand of a greyhound, the head and neck being a 
 masterly example of pure line drawing ; also there is a brace of dead 
 hares laid out. The two latter are signed " G. Morland, 1792," and 
 all are published by Harris, the sheep in 1794, the greyhound and 
 hares in 1793. 
 
 I have not seen the painting by Morland in the Louvre called La 
 Halte ; but judging from the small though fine etching by Paul Rajon 
 (undated) it must be a fine work. In the centre is a man on a white 
 horse ; in front of him, and to the spectator's right, is a brown white- 
 faced horse. A woman to the left of the picture looks up at the man, 
 who holds a bowl. A thatched public-house runs in perspective from 
 right to left. Behind and beyond it stands an overshadowing tree, and 
 the back of a sign set on a post. In front, to the extreme left, is a 
 pump and bucket. To the right of the brown horse is a penthouse 
 and doorway, two setters or spaniels in it. On the extreme right is 
 a rough-made solid table; a man is seated on the ground against it. 
 There is no date to this etching. 
 
 At Sir Charles Tennant's house there is a fine mezzotint called 
 The Ptiblic- House Door, published by J. R. Smith in 1801, and engraved 
 
82 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 by William Ward, which so closely resembles the design and arrangement 
 of this etching from La Halte, that it seems likely the mezzotint is from 
 the same picture, the date of which is probably some years previous 
 to iSoi. 
 
 I note too among the etchings by Vivares in the Print Room, one 
 of a dead pheasant, another of a young ass, in both of which the artist's 
 touch and manner have been interpreted better than by other engravers 
 or etchers. 
 
 Of several fine mezzotints by William Ward, after Morland, which 
 are at the Print Room in the British Museum, quite the finest is the 
 one from the picture called The Hard Bargain. Here all the three 
 men are really fine in drawing and modelling, as well as vigorous, and 
 lifelike in movement. They belie what I have said, and what is so 
 often true — of the lack of energy and solidity in Morland's farmers 
 and peasants. And if the original picture as far surpasses this 
 reproduction as do other pictures (already described), the mezzotints or 
 engravings of them at the Print Room, to be presently noted, this 
 Hard Bargain must be a masterpiece. The picture, according to Mr. 
 Richardson's list of Morland's paintings published in 1897, is in the 
 possession of Mr. George A. Daniel, Nunney Court, Frome, Somerset. 
 Inside a cow-stable a man is seated on the manger to the left; in his 
 hat is a sprig of oak, a rough dog is at his feet. The man looks on 
 in amusement at the bargaining. To the centre and to the right is 
 a group of two men, a bull calf, and a crop-eared bulldog lying 
 down. The man (a farmer) holding the calf by a rope (the left- 
 most of the two men bargaining) is bareheaded and expostulatory. 
 The intending buyer (a butcher probably) has his broad-brimmed hat 
 on ; he stands in the doorway at the right of the picture whence the 
 light comes; he is powerfully built, has a rugged jaw and a sinister 
 eye ; he is dressed in a long coat, and a loose kerchief is round his neck. 
 The calf (white) is very finely drawn and rendered. Published by 
 Cartwright, 1800. 
 
 There is a good mezzotint of The Turnpike Gate, now in Mr. 
 Fleming's possession and before described. The man inside the toll- 
 house is better defined than in the picture ; otherwise, though the mezzo- 
 tint is good, it is a mere echo of the painting, without the feeling and 
 atmosphere. It was published in 1806. 
 
SOME MEZZOTINTS, ETC., AFTER MORLAND 83 
 
 The Thatcher is another fine mezzotint after what must be a fine 
 picture. There is the usual cottage with deep-pitched roof on the 
 left, a man stands on a ladder to the left of the picture, thatching ; his 
 drawing, modelling, and action are capital : sheaves of straw stand and 
 lie under the ladder. A man stands at the ladder's foot, a boy in 
 front carries a bowl of water. In the centre is a white horse with a 
 sack slung across him; the sack is signed " G. Morland, 1795." Next 
 him to the right is a man on a brown horse, with oak leaves in his hat ; 
 a pig eats cabbages in front of the white horse. To the right a woman 
 in mob-cap and cloak carries a rush basket. A sign (of a bird) hangs 
 from the cottage roof. This is a fine impression. 
 
 Another and fainter example is published on the same date (1806) 
 by " G. Morland, 10, Dean Street, Soho," two years after George 
 Morland's death. 
 
 Sir Charles Tennant has a mezzotint of this subject, published in 
 1 808, and engraved by William Ward, which strikes me as finer than either 
 of the foregoing examples at the Print Room of the British Museum. 
 
 The drawing of the horses and other animals in all the examples of this 
 print is very queer, and not at all equal to Morland's painting at his best. 
 The open country in which the scene lies is however finely given. 
 
 The mezzotint from The Dram (at the Print Room) is a fair 
 interpretation of Sir Walter Gilbey's picture of that name. 
 
 In The Last Litter the rendering of the sow and young pigs 
 is very fine ; you can hear them chumping and guzzling. The man and 
 child are poor. Published by Cartwright in 1800. 
 
 The Frtiits of early Industry and Economy is a fine mezzotint, rich 
 in the rendering of stuffs and textures. 
 
 The Effects of youthful Extravagance and Idleness perhaps gives 
 the subject better than does the picture at Sir Walter Gilbey's ; but 
 this is an isolated case, so far as I have seen, of such superiority. 
 
 William Ward has also a fine mezzotint called Sailors' Conversation. 
 A boat hauled up, and a gnarled oak tree, are on the left. At the centre, 
 and to the right, three men are seated at a table, two bareheaded, the 
 other in a hat. A man in a fur cap is seated in front on the right of 
 the picture, a pipe in his mouth, and a glass on a small keg between 
 his knees. An open snuff-box, a bundle, and a thick cudgel are by his 
 side; above the men, in the porch of the steep-roofed cottage to the 
 
84 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 right, near or under which the men are seated, a pretty woman in a mob- 
 cap leans listening. There is a gleam of the river to the left, beyond 
 the oak. 
 
 There are two mezzotints, one the Cottagers Wealth, from the picture 
 at Canon Phillips' called Feeding the Pigs (and not to be confounded with 
 the mezzotint, at Sir Charles Tennant's, bearing the latter title and already 
 described, see pp. 6i, 62), the other from the picture of the Girl and 
 Calves, also in Canon Phillips' possession. Both of these are very much 
 inferior to the original pictures. The latter was published by S. Morgan 
 in 1802. Keating produced the mezzotint of the Cottagers Wealth. 
 
 The prints of the Gipsies and The Flash in the Pan are much 
 inferior to the pictures so named in Sir Walter Gilbey's possession. 
 There is a fine mezzotint by R. S. Syer, as fine as the picture at 
 Sir Charles Hamilton's, of the Alehouse Kitchen; J. R. Smith published 
 it. Other mezzotints by Keating are Children playing at Soldiers, 
 Trepanning a Recrint, The Recruit Deserted, and The Deserter's 
 Farewell. The first of these four has, I suppose, been done from that 
 fine example of Morland's earlier painting belonging to Sir Charles 
 Tennant, and already described. The boy in a conical hat holds an 
 improvised flag made from a spotted (not as in the original a red) 
 handkerchief tied to a stick ; the other boy in a conical cap, whom the 
 first is addressing, carries what looks like a toy musket (in the original 
 he wears a dark-drab hat, and a sword at his waist) ; another kneeling 
 to the left has also a toy musket. The rest of the design is pretty much 
 the same as the original picture. This mezzotint was published in 1788. 
 
 Trepanning a Recruit is also fine. On the left of the picture a 
 soldier with a drum, in bearskin cap with tassels hanging, and the drum 
 between his knees, seems to have put on the head of the recruit (a 
 stupid yokel in a smock frock) a three-cornered soldier's hat with ribbons 
 and feathers attached, and is fooling at it with one of his drum-sticks ; 
 next the recruit on the right of the picture stands a man with a sword 
 under his arm, and bareheaded ; to his right a young woman in a mob- 
 cap seems to entreat him ; a child sits and plucks at her shirt. Behind 
 is tree foliage, and a toned wall with a board nailed on it, ' Cumberland 
 House, D. Irwin, from Carlisle.' There is a latticed window in the 
 wall, a water-pipe above the window, and a thatched roof. This mezzotint 
 is dated 1791. 
 
SOME MEZZOTINTS, ETC., AFTER MORLAND 85 
 
 In The Recruit Deserted the most prominent figure is the defiant 
 and struggling wife with a besom in her left hand. A soldier in a 
 cocked hat, his right arm round her waist, with his left hand has seized 
 the besom and pulls at it. A child seated on the bed is crying with 
 outstretched arms to its mother, and the movement of it is very 
 childlike. Another soldier, his hat fallen off, a sword in his right hand, 
 collars the recruit, who had hidden under the bed. (Here, as is often 
 the case with Morland's men in movement, the soldier's action in 
 grasping is feeble.) Light comes through the open door on the left. 
 On the extreme left is a barrel, with a pitch-fork leaning against it ; 
 the soldiers have their hair clubbed at the back, they wear short open 
 tunics with fthe shirts turned back, frills and light-coloured breeches. 
 The one seizing the woman has a cartouche slung round his shoulders 
 by a belt, cross shaped. He has black or dark gaiters. The other, 
 whose hat has a plume and tassels, has no cartouche, and wears white 
 or light stockings and buckled shoes. 
 
 The mezzotint of a picture resembling Sir Walter Gilbey's Deserter s 
 Farewell, in subject is not so good as that picture, either in the grouping 
 and movement of the soldiers, or in the treatment of the wife. 
 
 Among the mezzotints engraved and published by Mr. J. R. Smith, I 
 note The Horse Feeder, published and engraved in 1797 by J. R. Smith, 
 of which Sir Charles Tennant has a finer impression, and The 
 Fisherman! s Hut, 1799. The latter is a fine engraving. A man in a 
 knitted cap is smoking a long clay pipe, a woman in a mob-cap holds 
 a child, whose face in its little close-fitting cap is charming ; there are 
 two boys to the left, one seated. By the man, and in front, is a basket 
 with fish in it, and a big fish lies outside it in front. The river is in the 
 background. 
 
 The mezzotint by S. W. Reynolds called Fishermen Going Out gives 
 a fine effect of lighting from a sunset on the left, striking on rainy thin 
 clouds to the right, and on two men in a boat, one of whom handles a net ; 
 a dog is in the bow of the boat. On the left is a slate-roofed cabin, and a 
 woman pours gin into a large mug held by a man in a fisherman's knitted 
 cap and long coat. This impression is far inferior to the very fine print 
 at Sir Charles Tennant's, by the same engraver, published in 1805 by 
 J. R. Smith. 
 
 The mezzotint by J. Dean called The Widow, published 1788, is 
 
86 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 attractive because of the odd fascination about the young widow with 
 her abundant rather tumbled hair, black dress covered with a light apron, 
 and black gloves. She holds a letter and is trying to look inconsolable. 
 A girl in a striped dress stands near, with her hand on the widow's chair 
 or sofa. A spaniel lies at the widow's foot. 
 
 There is a small but fine line engraving by J. Scott, published by 
 Cundee in 1805, of a pointer and hare. The hare is in a thicket to our 
 right close in front of the picture ; the pointer stands with head up, close 
 by, to the left, looking askance at the hare, but not pointing. The 
 drawing of the dog is fine, but not up to Blinks' work of to-day. An 
 oak tree overhangs from the right. The distance is charming. This, 
 engraving was from a picture belonging to Colonel Thornton. 
 
 There is a fine mezzotint, with no date, of the subject The Deserter 
 Pardoned. The rendering of the cloth and linen in the deserter's dress 
 (he is in shirt and breeches) is capital ; the officer releasing him is in 
 (probably) red coat and gold epaulettes, dark gaiters and light breeches ;, 
 the wife is in a dark bonnet and light dress. 
 
 Two mezzotints of Seizing the Deserter and The Deserter s Farewell' 
 are in movement as good as or better than those mentioned above, 
 particularly as to the former in the woman's action with the broom. 
 
 In Strangers at Home the drawing, modelling, and action of Roger 
 the sheepish lover are capital ; the fore-shortening of his arm raised to 
 scratch his head and his shy glance at his sweetheart are excellent. 
 It is a fine impression too. 
 
 E. Scott's mezzotint in colour of Boys robbing an Orchard, notwith- 
 standing Mr. Richardson's strictures, has a charm of movement as weO 
 as colour. The action of the boys is free and real : the boy shinning 
 down the apple-tree hand over fist, the boy running away, the two boys 
 picking up their coats and looking at the farmer who is loosing his 
 bull-dog at them, are all excellent. But, as observed generally in regard 
 to stipple or mezzotint interpretations of Morland's work, the charm 
 of handling in the original picture is lost ; moreover here the whole thing 
 is prettified, boys and all. 
 
 There is a fine mezzotint by C. Josi called The Peasant's Repast. 
 It is solemnly and clumsily described by Hassell (pp. 47, 48). There 
 is a small boy in skirts on the left, a bigger boy on the right drinking. 
 At his foot is an empty keg. A man sits in the centre of the picture, 
 
SOME MEZZOTINTS, ETC., AFTER MORLAND 87 
 
 glowering at the boy. There is a rough, crop-eared, crop-tailed dog, black 
 on head and ear, with black patch on his side, very finely drawn. An 
 oak-tree overshadows the group, and is nicely managed as to trunk and 
 leaves. A much finer example of this engraving is possessed by Sir 
 Charles Hamilton. 
 
 A fine mezzotint by R. M. Meadows called Gathering Wood is a 
 good interpretation of the picture Gathering Sticks at Sir Walter Gilbey's ; 
 but Sir Charles Hamilton owns a better impression. 
 
 Among the miscellaneous and anonymous mezzotints is one called, 
 why I don't know, The Child of Nature. She is a girl with a charming 
 figure in profile, clustering hair, a fichu over her bosom, and dressed in 
 the fashion of the time. She looks pretty and impulsive. 
 
 Among the mezzotints by J. R. Smith there are a good many 
 examples of the "Lsetitia" series — the best is called The Tavern Door ; 
 Lsetitia, in a Gainsborough hat, her hair flowing, and in a light dress, 
 stands talking to a very eager young man in a low-crowned hat, striped 
 waistcoat, breeches, and top-boots. A girl with a fringe, and her hair 
 over her shoulders like Laetitia, but in a dark dress, has her hand passed 
 through Lsetitia's arm, which is akimbo. Mr. Hassell describes Laetitia 
 as "with her arms akimbo, bullying a Jemmy." She seems to me very 
 tranquil and decidedly handsome. In a doorway in the background is a 
 girl with a playbill in one hand and a funnel-shaped bottle of fruit in the 
 other. The drawing of all three figures is very masterly. This print 
 was published by J. R. Smith in 1789. 
 
 A later print of the same subject, published by Ackerman in 181 1 
 (with four lines of verse describing Lsetitia's temporary profession), 
 shows Laetitia in a small rakish bonnet, her hair curling over her 
 forehead, and in a sort of Empire dress with a light cloak on her 
 shoulders. The other girl looks more of a blackguard ; she wears a 
 sort of cloth cap and tight-fitting dress, with a kerchief loosely knotted 
 round her neck. In this as in the former print Lsetitia is very pretty. 
 The man is identical in both prints. 
 
 Here I must conclude this short notice of pictures by Morland, 
 original drawings by him, and engravings in various methods after him. 
 As regards the pictures the notice is intended as far as possible to 
 be representative, to present a few types of fine work in the various 
 fields where Morland's genius found its delight. It has been impossible. 
 
88 
 
 GEORGE MORLAND 
 
 however, for me to see and describe several fine pictures, owing to their 
 distance from London ; while lack of opportunity and other reasons 
 have prevented my seeing some few in or near London. As regards 
 original drawings, it is probable that those described are fairly 
 representative of Morland's work in this method ; for, as we have seen, 
 his preparation for his pictures by means of drawings from nature, or 
 studies, seems to have been far less elaborate than is the habit of many 
 men at the present day. 
 
 In regard to examples of etchings, mezzotints, and other methods of 
 engraving after Morland, I have attempted nothing more than a 
 short account of a few that were easily accessible ; all these are at the 
 British Museum Print Room except where otherwise stated. But the 
 enormous number existing, and the various methods of engraving used on 
 them, demand a separate study ; and my principal object has been, 
 however unworthily, to pay tribute to the genius, as seen through his own 
 handiwork, of George Morland the Painter. 
 
Valentine's Day. By G. Morland. South Kensington Museum. 
 
Coming Storm. By James Ward. Collection of Sir Charles S. Ilamdion. 
 
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The Alehouse Dook. By G, Morland, Collection of George Salting, Esq. 
 
A Mare and Foal. By G. Morland. Collection of John Fleming, Esq. 
 
 A Mare and Foal. By G. Stubbs. Collection of Sir Charles S. Hamilton. 
 
Children Fishing. By G. Morland. Cullectiou of G. Harland Peck, Esq. 
 
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Studies of Hands. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Charles S. Hamilton. 
 
Sketch of a Man pouring Pigwash into a Tub. By G. Morland. 
 Collection of Sir Charles S, Hamilton. 
 
Horse from "The Death of the Fox." By G. Morland. 
 CoUcclion of Sir Walter Gilhey. 
 
Gathering Sticks. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Walter Gilbey. 
 
The Deserter's Farewell. By G. Morland. Collection of Sir Walter Gilbey. 
 
Morland's Servant, Simpson. By G. Morland. Collection of Canon Phillips, 
 
The Disconsolate and her Parrot. By G. Morland. Collection of Canon Phillips. 
 
Studies of Children, By G. Morland. From engravings in the British Museum,