George Morland

George Morland was born in London, June 26, ?1763 and died in London, October 29, 1804.

Intensely independent, Morland preferred selling finished works through dealers rather than working to the specifications of patrons. He began his career apprenticed to his father, a minor genre painter, who had him copying and forging paintings, particularly seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes. He left his family home at the end of his apprenticeship in 1784 and quickly established himself as a popular painter of rustic landscapes and smuggling scenes. Although his productions were both popular and prolific, and many of them engraved, Morland was plagued by financial problems and alcoholism and produced many slight works for the sake of quick money.