The Rise Of Landscape Painting

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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According to a great historian, Dr S R Gardiner, much of the best literature of the early nineteenth century was inspired by the ‘better side’ of the French Revolution, ‘its preference of the natural to the artificial, and of humble to the exalted’. This same preference is clearly visible in the art of George Morland (1763-1804).

Morland, who was born in London on June 26, 1763, was the son and the grandson of artists. His father, Henry Robert Morland (1730-97), discovered his son’s talent at an early age, and proceeded to force it with unparalleled avarice and tyranny, so that his unfortunate son had no life at all outside the garret in which he was kept earning money for the needy household. George Morland began drawing when he was three, at the age of ten he was exhibiting in the Royal Academy; but while his hand and his eyes were trained to accomplish remarkable feats of painting, the rest of his education was absolutely neglected, so that he grew up empty-headed, with a great longing to escape the paternal tyranny and be able to enjoy himself.
Inevitably, when he did at last break away from his father, he plunged into dissipation, and divided his time between drinking and painting. In 1786 he married and pulled himself together for a time, but he was so fond of his liberty that he refused an offer from Romney of £300 a year for three years to be his assistant, and preferred to ramble about the country painting rustic scenes and spending too much time and money in alehouses.

For a little while, before his health was ruined by drink, he was in easy circumstances, for his paintings of domestic scenes and farm life were exceedingly popular, and he was better known to the people than any of his august contemporaries. All his principal works were engraved, and these colored prints after Morland’s pictures found their way into many humble homes. It is probable that his well known painting at the National Gallery, ‘The Interior of a Stable’, was painted about 1791, which would nearly coincide with the period of Morland’s greatest prosperity. The stable is said to be that of the White Lion Inn at Paddington, where Morland once had as many as eight horses, but partly owing to his drinking habits and partly owing to his unbusinesslike methods his prosperity soon dwindled.

Nothwithstanding his dissipation—and a day rarely passed in which he was not drunk—he was not idle, for Morland was the author of four thousand pictures and of a still greater number of drawings. But his intemperance and his dependence on dealers gradually improverished his art, and the man who had a genuine love and understanding of countrylife, and ought to have been one of the world’s greatest rustic painters, sank into ‘pot boiling’, painting what the dealers wanted instead of what he wanted to do himself. His terms were four guineas a day—and his drink! Morland had got into the state when he ‘didn’t care,’ though in his sober moments he must have seen the irony and impropriety of a man of his character painting Hogarthian moralities like ‘The Fruits of Early Industry,’ ‘The Effects of Extravagance and Idleness,’ and so forth. Indeed, these in his own day were Morland’s most popular works, and though some of them show the degeneration of his drawing, and his carelessness in their ‘wooly’ rendering of form, even to the end a little painting more carefully handled and jewel-like in color will now and again show what a great painter he might have been. His last miserable years, 1800-4, were spent in debtor’s prison, yet even here, with a brandy bottle always handy, he was still industrious, and for one dealer alone during this period he painted one hundred and ninety two pictures. At the early age of forty one George Morland died, completely wrecked, the victim of his own want of education and of roguish employers.

The Rise Of Landscape Painting (continued)