This oil painting is one of a large group of objects bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend in 1868. It was painted by George Morland (1763-1804) and is signed G. Morland, 1791.
Morland showed a talent for painting at a very young age and exhibited chalk drawings at the Royal Academy as early as 1773, aged only ten years old. He was apprenticed to his father, the painter Henry Robert Morland (1716-1797), for seven years from 1777. During that time he was chiefly employed in the copying and forging of paintings, particularly seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes.
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Between 1786 and 1790 Morland established his reputation as a painter of moralizing and domestic genre subjects. From 1790 onwards his focus shifted to rustic genre subjects, notable for their conspicuous lack of incident. This painting is typical of this sort of work and shows the way in which Morland managed to depict such subjects without over-sentimentalising them.
Morland had a prolific output, reputedly painting more than 800 works in the last eight years of his life but his extravagant life-style meant he was often plagued by debt. His paintings were extremely popular and widely copied by engravers to meet the demand that existed for his work in Britain, France and Germany.
