GEORGE MORLAND. 



A Biographical Sketch. 



TO all lovers of English art the pictures of George Morland 

 have an irresistible charm which time has not staled, nor 

 new schools of painting have made less admirable. 

 Constable, the father of English landscape art, who first 

 taught our painters to abandon the old classical conventions and to 

 go to school with nature, was a greater master than Morland, and 

 had a more potent influence upon the progress of art in Europe. 

 But Morland must always hold a very special place in our admira- 

 tion and affection. He was the genius of English rural life in the 

 eighteenth century. Without the reverent sense of communion 

 with nature, which gives a spiritual splendour to Constable's land- 

 scapes, and without the sublime imagination of Turner, which put 

 the very glory of the skies on to a square of canvas, he had 

 a healthy love and a familiar understanding of English country 

 life and scenes, free from the sentimentality of later painters, and 

 a frank realism and candour which make his pictures appeal 

 to one's sense of truth. The spirit of rural England in the 

 eighteenth century lives in his pictures. He loved its old barns with 

 their great beams and dim light. He loved its farmyards with all 

 their rough disorder of country implements and stock. He loved 

 its old houses, its old inns, its old wooden bridges. He was at 

 home in the stable, and gave the immortality of his art to many a 

 brave old horse and shaggy colt. He was the true friend, indeed, 

 of all animals, and Francis of Assisi himself, who called the silly 

 sheep his " good brothers," and preached to the birds of the air and 

 the beasts of the field, had not more affection than Morland, who 

 was in no way a saint, for such works of God as pigs and poultry, 

 dogs and cattle, and every live thing of the woods and meadows. 



Morland, though he came of a good family and lived some years 

 of his life in the town, was always a countryman at heart. Though 

 he might have consorted with men of wit and fashion, and toyed 



