3-009-010 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Sheep", by Morland, in the International Exhibition, 1862. 'There is no painter of the English school, with the exception of Gainsborough, who could have treated so simple a subject with such true feeling for rustic nature, such skill and harmony of arrangement, and such consummate facility of handling as Morland has shown in the beautiful little picture we have engraved. Morland's works, like those of Gainsborough, are rather sketches than finished pictures; but this one has, with all the charm of a sketch, none of the carelessness and slovenliness which too often disfigure the painter's works. This little gem has also what is still more rarely found in Morland's landscapes...a lovely, warm, mellow, golden tone suffusing the foreground, the sheep, and the oak, tingeing the limpid atmosphere, and flushing the solitary cloud with the radiance and colour of the chrysophrase...[This painting is] only one of some 4000 works which Morland in a short life dashed off, with perhaps unparalleled rapidity...the whole history of the British school does not furnish another instance of a painter with so deplorable a story of a life passed in almost daily dissipation and closed at forty by paralysis in a sponging-house'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.