art he painted pictures of _Boys
Robbing an Orchard_, _Horses in a Stable_, or a _Farmer on Horseback_
staying to talk to a group of gypsies beside a wood, and whether or not
the picture might be classed as a landscape depended entirely on the
nature of the scene itself. Whatever he saw or chose to see he painted
with equal skill and with equal charm; and as his choice of vision lay
in the simple everyday life that surrounded him, his variety is not the
least of his attractions.

The fact that his mother was a Frenchwoman (his father was Henry
Morland, the painter of the delightful pair of half-lengths, _The
Laundry Maids_) suggests to my mind the wild surmise that she may have
been the daughter of Chardin. For in the technique as well as in the
temperament of Morland,--making allowance for difference of
circumstances,--there is something remarkably akin to those of the great
Frenchman. Both eschewed the temptation to become fashionable, both
painted the humble realities of middle-class life with a zest that could
not possibly have been affected, and both painted them with much the
same extraordinary charm. At his best, Morland is not much inferior to
Chardin, and but for his unfortunate wildness and his susceptibility to
the temptations of strong drink, he might easily have excelled the
other. The feeling exhibited in two such different subjects as Lord
Glenconner's _Boys Robbing an Orchard_, and _The Interior of a Stable_,
in the National Gallery, certainly equals that of Chardin's most famous
pieces, I mean the feeling for the particular scene he is depicting. The
nearest, in fact the only, approach that Morland made to portrait
painting was in such pieces as _The Fortune Teller_ in the National
Gallery, which brings to mind the "Conversation Pieces," introduced by
Hogarth and Highmore into English painting, but which were never widely
attempted. In the Portfolio monograph "English Society in the Eighteenth
Century" I tried to collect as many examples as I could of this form of
art, but found it difficult to fill even a small volume, so entirely was
the single figure portrait the vogue. A few notable instances are worth
mentioning, if only as exceptions to the general rule. Gainsborough's
_Ladies Walking in the Mall_, belonging to Sir Audley Neeld; Reynolds's
large group of _The Marlborough Family_ at Blenheim, and a very early
group of _The Elliott Family_, consisting of eleven figures, belonging
to Lord St Germans;