Interior of a Stable 

George Morland, a popular English painter, probably made this painting of a stable interior in the 1790s. Morland produced art for the market, with prints being made after his paintings so a wide audience could appreciate them. Paintings like this tell us something about the social conditions of England in the Georgian period, an era of agricultural and industrial change, and how artists found their niche within it. Morland specialized in rural genre scenes that appealed to city dwellers, who were nostalgic for a countryside that was fast disappearing. You can see that in this stable scene. It romanticizes rural labor and the relationship between people and animals, but it also presents a picture of the social hierarchy that characterized the time. Art historians use parish records, census data, and tax returns to understand the subjects of paintings, but paintings themselves can also teach us so much about the lives, labor, and leisure of people in the past.