Excerpt from George Morland and the Evolution From Him of Some Later Painters

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.

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 prayers, 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 effect 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, aesthetic 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]. 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.

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