'Hunt for £3m painting not seen for 200 years' ran the rather breathless headline of an article in last Saturday's Daily Telegraph, about curators of an exhibition at Leighton House in London looking for a priceless, lost painting of Joshua Reynolds' studio. To our surprise - and delight - the artist in question is none other than George Morland, the colourful and picaresque painter of rural life in late eighteenth-century England, and so it is with pleasure that we are able to offer here one of his charming genre scenes, in fine condition, and at a more accessible level.

'Precocious, naturally gifted and naturally dissolute', George Morland was born in London the son of the painter and engraver Henry Robert Morland, to whom he was first apprenticed for seven years in 1777. A visit to the Pas-de-Calais in France in 1785 exposed him to the work of Louis-Léopold Boilly, originally from Lille, and Morland was soon producing attractive genre scenes and childhood subjects, somewhat in the manner of Boilly, and also echoing the work of Francis Wheatley. An outstanding example from this period of Morland's life is to be found on display upstairs in The Wallace Collection, entitled A Visit to the Boarding School (1788). In 1786 he married Anne, the sister of James Ward, another artist familiar to readers of Gallery Notes. His brother, William Ward, engraved no fewer than sixty-nine of Morland's pictures and in turn married Maria Morland, Geroge's sister - reminding us that painting was very much a family affair in the past! Not least because of the influence of James Ward, and also his friendship with Julius Caesar Ibbetson, in the 1790s Morland turned to what might be called rustic genre, cottage scenes, gypsies and smugglers. In the words of a biographer a century ago, Morland's 'pictures illustrate English life and customs as they existed along the road, in the farmhouse, in the inn, in the humble abode of the peasant. Where his sympathies abounded, there his art flourished...He is indeed, of the earth, earthy.'

Morland exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy for the last twenty years of his life, but his later years were clouded by reckless self-indulgence. His work was enormously popular, and, like many of his contemporaries, he drew inspiration from Nature’s cycle and sometimes delighted in painting wintry scenes as a contrast. No doubt aware of the flighty and romantic associations of ice skating as embraced by the grandees on the Serpentine in his native London, Morland here shows us with gentle humour the reality of this brave, new pastime among the more humble ranks of society.

James Mitchell

November 2026