Oddly enough, although Morland is reputed to have painted many inn-signs, not one has survived; or perhaps, more strictly speaking, not one of the existing paintings by him has been identified with a former sign.
Morland died in 1824, and twenty years later one “J. B. P.,” in The Somerset House Gazette, described how, walking from Laleham to Chertsey Bridge, and sheltering at the “Cricketers,” a small public-house there, he noticed, while sitting in the parlour, a painting of a cricket-match. The style seemed familiar, and he at last recognised it as Morland’s. Questioning the landlord, he learned that forty-five years earlier the inn was the “Walnut Tree,” and that a “famous painter” had lodged there and painted the picture. It grew so popular with local cricketers that at last the name of the house was altered.
The stranger offered to buy, but the landlord declared he would not sell. It seemed that he took it with him when he set up a booth at Egham and Staines races, “an’ cricket-matches and such-like.” It was, in fact, his trade-mark.
Mine host thought in shillings, but the stranger in guineas.
“How,” he asked, “if I offered you £10 10s.?”
“Ah, well!” rejoined the publican: “it should go, with all my heart,”—and go it did.
Thus did the purchaser describe his bargain: “The painting, about a yard in length and of a proportionate height, is done on canvas, strained upon something like an old shutter, which has two staples at the back, suited to hook it for its occasional suspension on the booth-front in the host’s erratic business at fairs and races. The scene I found to be a portrait of the neighbouring cricket-green called Laleham Borough, and contains thirteen cricketers in full play, dressed in white, one arbiter in red and one in blue, besides four spectators, seated two by two on chairs. The picture is greatly cracked, in the reticulated way of paint when much exposed to the sun; but the colours are pure, and the landscape in a very pleasing tone, and in perfect harmony. The figures are done as if with the greatest ease, and the mechanism of Morland’s pencil and his process of painting are clearly obvious in its decided touches, and in the gradations of the white particularly. It cannot be supposed that this freak of the pencil is a work of high art; yet it certainly contains proof of Morland’s extraordinary talent, and it should seem that he even took some pains with it, for there are marks of his having painted out and re-composed at least one figure.”
The appreciation of Morland in his lifetime is well shown by a story of himself and Williams, the engraver, tramping, tired, hungry, thirsty and penniless, from Deal to London. They came at last to “the ‘Black Bull’ on the Dover Road”—wherever precisely that may have been—and Morland offered the landlord to repaint his faded sign for a crown, the price of a meal. The innkeeper knew nothing of Morland, and was at first unwilling; but he at length agreed, and rode off to Canterbury for the necessary materials.
The friends eventually ran up a score a few shillings in excess of that contemplated originally by the landlord, and left him dissatisfied with his bargain. Meanwhile, artist and engraver tramped to town, and, telling the story to their friends in the hearing of a long-headed admirer of Morland’s work, he rode down and, we are told, purchased the “Black Bull” sign from the amazed landlord for £10 10s.
The story is probably in essentials true, but that unvarying ten-guinea price is inartistic and unconvincing.