Nowhere were the changes from barbarism to sophistication so clearly mirrored as in the houses, the furniture, the clothes, the style of life of the rich. By 1750 the Western world had captured a vast commerce unequaled in history and this manifested itself in the noble houses of eighteenth-century England…
—Description:The Angler’s Repast (oil on canvas) by Morland, George (1763-1804)–Read More:http://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-anglers-repast-george-morland.html
Land equaled power: that simple equation was quickly grasped and men set about deliberately extending their acres. They looked for heiresses of wide lands; they stopped providing estates for their younger sons, turning them out into the professions ( law, Church, army,navy, or, if need be, commerce); they devised strict legal settlements so that the heir to great territories became merely the tenant for life- for they hoped by these strict entails that their agglomerations of wealth and power might be protected from the dissolute, the incompetent, the mad.
—Blind Mans Bluff
George Morland was an 18th century English painter. Morland mainly painted rustic scenes of peasants and country folk in interiors, playing games and living out their daily life. He exhibited first at the Royal Academy when he was only ten years old, and was an apprentice by the time he was fourteen.—Read More:http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/morland.php
Naturally, the well-endowed succeeded at the expense of the lesser gentry. They had the resources or the credit to buy up what became available; they could make better bids for heiresses; they could afford more specialized advice, legal or practical, take risks and win profits from more experimental farming or indulge their fancy in more industrial enterprises. Coral-like, their wealth grew. Sometimes the disasters of life- lack of heirs, civil war, insanity not in one but several generations- pulled a great family down, but when it did it usually enriched the few that remained, or scattered opportunities to the lesser gentry. Furthermore, the greater the family and the wider its local social and political power, the more certain it could be of playing an important and lucrative part in national life; and from this came titles, honors, sinecures, pensions, the great offices of Church or State.
—Artist
John Wootton (?1682‑1764)
Title
Viscount Weymouth’s Hunt: Thomas, 2nd Viscount Weymouth, with a Black Page and other Huntsmen at the Kill
Date
1733-6
Medium
Oil paint on canvas—Read More:http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wootton-viscount-weymouths-hunt-thomas-2nd-viscount-weymouth-with-a-black-page-and-other-t11835
COMMENTS