This small exhibition devoted to George Morland (1763 – 1804), held in the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery of Leeds University, is the first to be held since a small exhibition in Reading in 1975 and aims to give new audiences the opportunity to see a selection of paintings by this prolific artist whose popularity during his lifetime was unbounded. He was born in 1763, the son of Henry Robert Morland, a painter of portraits and genre pieces and a picture dealer, who employed young George to repair pictures and fake Old Masters. Clearly talented, he was apprenticed to his father from 1777 to 1784, before he set up on his own. He first came to notice with his fancy pseudo-rustic pictures in the vein of Francis Wheatley (1747–1801), exhibiting drawings and paintings at the Society of Artists, the Free Society of Artists and the Royal Academy with great success. Morland lived a flamboyant and dissipated life fuelled by drink and was permanently in debt. He was constantly dodging his creditors whose demands for repayment led to an enormous production of paintings; the best executed with sparkling facility and widely popularised through prints, but also easily copied, resulting in an almost overwhelming quantity of work wildly varying in quality bearing his name.

The Artist in his Studio and his Man Gibbs (datable to 1800-1803, Nottingham City Museums and Galleries) introduces the visitor to the artist towards the end of his short life since he died in 1804. Dr Nick Grindle, curator of the exhibition, in his detailed essay in the accompanying publication/catalogue, George Morland: Art, Traffic and Society in Late Eighteenth Century England, states: “Morland’s painting room is the point where the artist’s life and practice meet, and the specificity of the space, the activities that took place there, and the people who visited it, all give us an insight how to approach the rest of his work”. Light from a window in the back wall of this humble room illuminates a large painting of a rustic cottage on his easel. Seated in front of this is the hunched figure of Morland, who looks out at us with a self-deprecating expression, palette in hand and his painting materials carefully laid out on a small circular-topped stool. An empty bottle lies carelessly on the floor in front of a stack of paintings. On the left is his man Gibbs, in a green coat with his back to us, frying sausages over an open fire watched by two dogs, while scratched/drawn on the wall above the fireplace are heads of boxers, a resting donkey and a pig, the latter an allusion to his well-known fondness for painting pigs. In the tradition of paintings of artists in their studios, Morland’s composition recalls low life scenes of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters and much has been made of the local company he kept. However, in contrast, the portrait (1792) by his friend the painter and mezzotint engraver John Raphael Smith (1751 – 1812), shows a confident Morland, in riding dress, at his easel turning to greet the viewer. Immediately after his death this image was greatly enhanced and engraved as a mezzotint (1805) to consolidate both of their reputations.

J. R. Smith’s portrait was probably painted in connection with the exhibition he hosted of thirty-six paintings by Morland, both for sale and to be engraved, in his King Street premises in Covent Garden in 1793. The paintings in the present exhibition almost all date from this decade when the artist was at the height of his powers and they represent a variety of scale and subject matter. Best known for his paintings of rural life, this is exemplified by Inside of a Stable (1791, Tate Gallery). A white horse followed by a brown one, both blinkered, and a pony are led into the dark stable by a hatted figure wearing an unlikely posy of purplish flowers. Light pours through the door illuminating the white horse and a lumpish fellow gathering straw. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy by its purchaser David Brown and recorded as the most admired work that year. Success enabled Morland to obtain more credit and he moved to a house in Paddington with a garden, stables and chaise house in which he kept an old horse and a menagerie of donkeys, pigs and dogs which feature frequently in his paintings. The white horse appears in many of his pictures such as in his superb landscape, Morning, or The Benevolent Sportsman (1792, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), painted as a gallery picture for Colonel Charles Stuart, and exhibited at the Royal Academy probably as a pendant to Evening or The Sportsman’s Return, now lost. Charity had become a common theme in the late eighteenth century and Morland may have taken as his model ‘military charity’ as exemplified by Edward Penny’s The Marquis of Granby Relieving a Sick Soldier (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1765, “in a bid to acknowledge Stuart’s military career”. However, Morland’s picture is very different and the subject includes a group of gypsies, who crouch in front of their tent, looking up at the Sportsman on his white horse who dispenses charity to a figure almost invisible behind the horse’s neck. Gainsborough is known to have revived the subject of gypsies in the mid-eighteenth century and in his landscape, Gypsy Encampment, Sunset (1778-1780, Tate Gallery), a group of gypsies are huddled around a fire in the shade of a clump of trees where the emphasis is on the atmosphere and the twilight view into the distance. Gypsies were considered to be an underclass and the inhabitants of Morland’s landscape, closely observed, are placed against a freely painted tree and pearly grey sky. The same white horse appears in many of Morland’s paintings, including his most successful in the exhibition Evening in Leicestershire (boy burning wood) from 1792, lent from a private collection (as Burning Weeds). In this tranquil scene the rider is brought a drink by a young girl in front of a lowly dwelling with an open door watched by two poorly dressed children. Against a background of trees, a rustic cottage with white washing drying over a wall fills the centre of the composition, while a boy with his back to the group tends a fire. Grey white smoke billows out of the scene, in contrast to the two dogs who impassively watch each other. This rural idyll scene recalling Dutch seventeenth century paintings was engraved. Replicas are recorded, as well as other versions of the subject, which all points to its popularity.

Morland, who spent some time on the Isle of Wight and was very familiar with coastal life, painted a number of coastal scenes, here represented by The Wreckers (1791, Southampton City Art Gallery). This shows a group of rough men struggling in a dark storm against a howling gale to salvage the cargo washed ashore from a wreck, and loading it onto a horse and cart. In the left corner, pushed aside, lie two figures of drowned men. The title of the picture and whether it represents wreckers or an otherwise innocent shipwreck have been the subject of debate but Morland paints in the popular tradition of coastal scenes and shipwrecks by Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714 – 1789) and Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740 – 1812), though perhaps with even greater immediacy. They are the subject of an interesting essay in the accompanying publication George Morland at the Coast by Martin Purvis.

In complete contrast, Morland painted a series of smaller compositions such as the pair The Comforts of Industry and The Miseries of Idleness (Scottish National Gallery) painted before 1790 in the manner of French cabinet pictures. The juxtaposition of these two domestic interiors and the detailed conditions of the two families are vividly witnessed and exquisitely painted with echoes of Boilly. The Tea-Garden (c.1790, Tate Gallery) is set in Bagnigge Wells, a Pleasure Garden north of Clerkenwell, and represents three generations of a family arranged around a table set with a blue and white tea service. The fashionably dressed mother, holding her baby, takes a biscuit from her husband with the rather expressionless grandparents looking on. The children – a little girl with a wooden horse pats the dog begging a morsel from the boy – provide a note of informality. It has been interpreted by Nick Grindle as “suffused with tension” and this reading of the picture is explored in some detail in the catalogue. On the other hand, when stipple engraved by François David Soiron in 1790, the expressions of the members of the family in this conversation piece are rendered more immediately appealing presumably to encourage sales. Another revealing small picture is Easy Money (undated, Kirklees Collection, Huddersfield Art Gallery) where a group of very colourful characters are depicted in an inn. Arranged across the picture space, a fashionably-dressed man is paying a plump woman behind the bar, drawing his money pouch from his pocket, while his companion, a woman with red shoes identified as a prostitute, her arm in his, points at him with the other and turns away towards a grinning figure, with a patch over his eye, who enters through the door on the left and to whom another woman is handing a purse. The scene is watched by a sinister female behind the group. Tail down, one of Morland’s dogs in the foreground nervously watches the action, and the elements of parody identify this scene as one from the theatre.

The popularity of Morland’s paintings owed much to their reproduction in mezzotints and stipple engravings which is the subject of David Alexander’s excellent essay ‘George Morland and the Print Market’ in the accompanying publication. All the prints in the exhibition are lent by him unless otherwise specified.

Two notable hand-coloured mezzotints lent to the exhibition from Wilberforce House Museum, Hull, are Slave Trade and African Hospitality, engraved and published by John Raphael Smith in 1791 after Morland’s paintings Execrable Human Traffick or The Affectionate Slaves (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1788) and European Ship wrecked on the Coast of Africa or African Hospitality (c1788-1790, exhibited in the Society of Artists in 1790). Today both are in the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, and not in the exhibition. These paintings and their reproductions are outside the normal range of Morland’s subject matter and were presumably special commissions with considerable input from those commissioning them. Notwithstanding more interest in anti-slavery history and perceived contemporary resonances, there had been growing unease in London from the late eighteenth century. Led by the Quakers the ‘Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ was founded in 1787.

This exhibition demonstrates how deeply Morland was rooted in tradition, a master of his craft whose subjects reveal him a man of the moment and who between his drinking bouts proved himself to be a first rate painter acknowledged as such in his time. This is complemented by the four biographies published soon after his death which are filled with anecdotes about his life and provide a vivid picture of the artist. However, Morland deserves a much more comprehensive exhibition.

As a footnote, I would like to draw attention to the earliest known portrait in oils of a black soldier in the British Army which has just emerged from a private collection (as yet unpublished, Philip Mould & Co). The evidence from the uniform identifies the private as of the 8th West India Regiment and a date of 1803-06. This regiment was originally raised in 1795 for service in the British Caribbean Colonies and was made up of free-black men and also slaves. The latter were later freed under the revised Mutiny Act of 1807.

George Morland: In the Margins was at The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, The University Library, Leeds from March 18th to July 11th, 2015.

Image: George Morland, The Artist in His Studio and his Man Gibbs (courtesy of Nottingham City Museums and Galleries).