Do horses also look like their owners?
George Morland: Hack or Hero?
It’s true that some people do end up looking like their dogs; but like their horses too? Above, we see a portrait of a favourite elderly white rescue horse and, above right, a sketch of the artist who owned and painted this horse.
If we look carefully, we can see between the horse and the human the same heavily-lidded eyes that look like they’ve ‘seen it all’, the same three-quarter profile angle, the same fleshy, sensual lips and the same world-weary facial expression.
In the late 18th Century, George Morland (1763-1804) was one of England’s most popular painters. Described as an ‘idle and dissipated genius’, Morland was, in fact, prolific, producing over 4,000 works in his short life, before dying of ‘brain fever’ at only 42.
He was known and loved best for his scenes of the rural working poor, and the horses, donkeys, dogs, pigs, poultry and other animals they cared for.
There was always a steady market for these gentle scenes of daily life on farms and inns, so much so that greedy art dealers rushed Morland’s freshly finished paintings off to buyers still wet.
The ready cash enabled him to carry on with his drinking, gambling and compulsive spending. He kept eight riding horses for himself and borrowed hired hacks that he occasionally ‘forgot’ to return.
Morland preferred to paint horses who were endearing characters, rather than beautiful. But, from around about 1790, there was one he painted habitually, over and over again – an old, white, possibly blind gelding of draft type.
Much like a favoured human model, this white horse appears dozens of times in Morland’s painting – as a riding horse, a post horse, pulling a cart, hauling slates, as well as resting in stables.
Placed centrally in the compositions, this old white horse always has the power to draw our eye and he manages to become the central actor in every scene he inhabits.
In ‘Old horses with a dog in a stable’, 1791, we see him at his most anthropomorphic, portrayed with long eyelashes and disturbingly human-looking eyes, resting a hind leg, with a companion behind him having a nap and a guard dog tied up to the manger. He is old, as we see from his sway back, protruding hip bones and his thinness (we wonder when his teeth were last checked!) but he’s not fully retired, as we can clearly see from the glinting shoes on all his hooves. A sense of peace, rest and even a little world-weariness pervades this humble scene.
An early biographer, Richardson, proposes this horse was one of Moreland’s many ‘rescue’ animals, noting that: “In the garden of his house [near the White Lion Inn, Paddington, where this stable was], Morland kept all sorts of animals – foxes, goats, pigs, dogs, monkeys, squirrels, guinea pigs, dormice, besides a donkey and an old horse, which latter frequently appears in his pictures”.
So, it appears then that, not only was this old horse real and actually owned by Morland, but he also became an embodiment or personification of Morland himself, who gives the impression of making a kind of visual pun on himself as both a ‘hack’, a riding horse, and ‘an old hack’; that is, an artistic hack, painting for drink money.
More work in the Morland archive is needed to discover the name of this horse, but there can be no doubt about the shared identity between horse and artist, with its intentional blurring of animal-human boundaries; nor can there be any doubt about the strong character of this lovable senior equine that drew Morland to him both as companion and favourite subject.
Like the artist himself, this horse calmly contemplates the minutia of daily life, upon which he casts a humorous and weary, yet tolerant, gaze.
Image Captions:
Image 1: George Morland, ‘Old horses with a dog in a stable’, 1791, Oil on canvas. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.
Image 2: Sketch of George Morland by J.R. Smith. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.
