Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Morland, Henry Robert
MORLAND, HENRY ROBERT (1730?–1797), portrait-painter, the son of George Henry Morland [q. v.], was born probably about 1730. He was a painter of portraits and domestic subjects in oil and crayons, and between 1760 and 1791 exhibited 118 works at the Society of Artists, the Free Society, and the Royal Academy. He also engraved in mezzotint, cleaned and dealt in pictures, and sold artists' materials, including excellent crayons of his own manufacture. In spite of all these means of livelihood and a good character for he is said to have been respected by all who knew him he was unsuccessful in life, and more than once bankrupt. He painted a portrait of George III, which was engraved by Houston, and a portrait of Garrick as Richard III, which is in the Garrick Club. Lord Mansfield has two carefully finished pictures by him of young ladies one washing, the other ironing which used to pass as portraits of the celebrated Misses Gunning, but more probably were drawn from his own daughters or other models. He was an artist of some merit but of no conspicuous ability, and after an unsettled life, marked by frequent changes of residence, died in Stephen Street, Rathbone Place, 30 Nov. 1797. His age, at his death, has been stated as eighty-five, but this must be an exaggeration if his father was born in the eighteenth century. He was the father of George Morland [q. v.] Maria Morland, his wife, was also an artist, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1785 and 1786, one work in each year.
[Redgrave's Dict.; Bryan's Dict. (Graves and Armstrong); Algernon Graves's Dict.; Cunningham's Lives of Painters (ed. Heaton, article ‘George Morland’). Some account of him will also be found in the Lives of his son quoted at end of article on George Morland.]