A Rocky Coast Scene with Fishermen

Size of original painting 36 x 40 inches

Smugglers, Isle of Wight

Size of original painting 28 x 36 inches

The Wreckers (also see here)

Signed, undated

Size of original painting 50 x 80.5 inches

Wreckers

The Day After the Wreck

A sepia image of "The Day After the Wreck"

Wreck of an Indiaman off the Needles (signed)

Fishermen Waiting for the Evening Breeze

Bargaining for Fish

A Sea-Piece

Look here Girl on a seashore on a windy day

"The Lighthouse" from the original painting.

"Boat on Seashore"

Yarmouth Fort (same as Wreck of an Indiaman off the Needles)

Wreck of a Boat (signed)

Sea Coast, Men and Boats

"Fishing Boat" from the original painting

A Shipwreck Off the Isle of Wight

This George Moreland (1763-1804) oil on canvas "A Shipwreck Off the Isle of Wight" is signed and dated 1800.
The artist has focused his attention on the three survivor's (and a dog) clinging to a rocky bluff as their storm savaged ship disintegrates before their eyes. Moreland has painted a dramatic portrayal of man pitted against the unsentimental forces of nature. Moreland combines figurative and marine painting with a composition devoting the top half of the canvas to the depiction of voluminous clouds and an emerging blue sky. Moreland's selective choice of detail lends a greater atmosphere of survival and redemption as the purity of those psychological states lift the mood of the painting.
Painted four years before his death George Moreland had come to artistic maturity and he had achieved a vigorous personal style. He understood naval architecture and knew how to paint marine scenes with confidence and clarity. It is also apparent that he mastered the difficult talent of depicting turbulent water and storms with confidence and clarity.

Born on 26 June 1763 in London, son of the painter H. R. Morland to whom he was first apprenticed. He visited Calais and St-Omer in 1785 painting sentimental genre scenes, somewhat in the manner of Boilly. In 1786 he married Anne, the sister of William Ward. In the 1790s he turned to rustic genre, but his later years were clouded by reckless self-indulgence. He exhibited intermittently at the SA 1777-91, FS 1775-82, and Royal Academy, London 1773-1804. He died of a brain fever in London on 29 October 1804. Morland, was born in a fortunate hour : before the dawn of the eighteenth centuy there was no English art properly so called ; the only painters of eminance were foreigners from the Low Contries, Germany France and Sapin. These laid the foundations of art eduction in this country : they established schools of a kind, and gave English youths of promise instruction ; but for half a century or more, say until 1750, art in England was practically in the hands of aliens.Then came a very remarkable succession of English painters who reaches the first rank : Reynolds born in 1723, Stubbs 1724, Gainsborough 1729, Romney 1734, Raeburn 1756, Morland 1763, Crome 1769, Turner 1775, constable 1776.Reynolds and Romney were essentially portrait painters ; Gainsborough, though his fame rests upon portraits, was also a landscape painter, Raeburn, sometimes called "the Scottish Reynolds" was a portrait painter ; Crome, turner, and Constable were landscape painters.Morland painted rural life. nothing quite like his scenes of peasant and country life had ever been seen before.Perhaps another quality of Morland's art may have contributed to its popularity ; it was above all things English ; it is quite impossible to mistake Morland's men and women for other than English men and women, or his scenes for scenes outside England.From George Morland - His life and Works by Sir Walter Gilbey, Bart. Elsenham Hall, July 1907.

From ebay sales at Sothebys August 2002