Profligate Genius

For sheer output, no English painter of the 18th century came close to the eccentric genius. George Morland. In a brief lifetime he finished about 4,000 canvases, most of them seascapes, sentimental family groupings and bucolic country scenes.

Unfortunately for Morland's career and subsequent reputation, few contemporaries could match his prodigious consumption of alcohol.* But through the years, Morland's work has kept a kind of dogged popularity. Last week a show at London's Tate Gallery, commemorating the painter's death in 1804, showed one reason why. No English painter has left a more powerful or popular picture of rural Old England. A man of common pleasures himself, Morland, through his work, has addressed himself over the centuries to the common man's comprehension.

Paintings for Gin. Morland started out as an infant prodigy. He was already sketching at three, soon painted spiders that scared the servant girls. At ten he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy. Beginning at 14, Morland went through seven years of training. He was apprenticed to his father, a twice bankrupt painter and art dealer, locked in an upper room turning out copies of English and Dutch masterpieces which his father sometimes foisted off as originals. But while still a fuzzless youth, Morland started drinking. To keep himself supplied with gin, young Morland secretly painted sexy love scenes, lowered them on a string to a confederate to be sold for gin money. Before his apprenticeship ended, Morland turned down a handsome offer from the painter Romney, set off on a roistering, rakehell career that sent him to his grave at 41.

Morland got his first real look at the sea when he ran off to Margate and stayed with a rich lady of easy virtue. Though he finally settled down long enough to get married (showing up for the wedding wearing two huge pistols), his chosen companions remained the ostlers, potboys, horse jockeys, moneylenders, pawnbrokers, punks and pugilists who often served as his models. They shared Morland's love of gin and practical jokes. Once Morland stuffed the chairs of a public house with mackerel, returned with his cronies to complain to the frantic landlord of the frightful stench.

On to the Pub. The need for live models was Morland's excuse for every sort of extravagance. He kept a menagerie which included foxes, goats, hogs, monkeys and dormice. To get material for The Deserter, he commandeered a sergeant, drummer and soldier, plied them with ale and tobacco for two days. Morland sold well, but often he could not wait for purchasers to leave his studio before uttering three loud "huzzahs" and heading straight for the nearest pub. At the peak "of his career, Morland, only 28, found himself -L-4,000 in debt. Morland's life became an unending struggle to keep out of debtors' prison. To meet his creditors' and dealers' demands, he stepped up his potboiling output to one and two paintings a day, filled his canvases with short cuts (masses of foliage and shadows, figures swathed in formless cloaks).

Only occasionally did Morland take pains to work out a painting carefully. One of his last and best canvases was painted while Morland was visiting his sick wife in Paddington two years before his death. Just released from prison, Morland painted himself, attended by his manservant Gibbs frying sausages. From his self-portrait Morland looks out with watery, disconsolate eyes. At his feet Morland painted what might well have been his own grim epitaph, an overturned glass and bottle, both empty.

* Morland recounted a day's drinking at Brighton: beginning with Hollands gin and rum and milk before breakfast, it went on through nine different beverages, including opium and water, topped off with gin, shrub and rum before bed.

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