'Old Red Lion' Inn

The inn subject — particularly the alehouse and the coaching inn — runs throughout George Morland's work as a recurring social space where travellers, locals, horses, and dogs mingled in the democratic disorder of public hospitality. The "Old Red Lion" inn, if a specific establishment, may be one of the many rural pubs Morland painted during his wandering life; more likely it is a composite of the inn types he knew well from his years of avoiding London. Inn scenes allowed him to combine interior and exterior genre — the stable yard outside, the taproom and parlour within — and to populate his compositions with figures of varied social types engaging in the rituals of rest, drink, and departure. Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery in Leeds holds this canvas, part of a strong Yorkshire collection of British genre painting.

On canvas, the inn composition likely combines architectural setting with human figures and horses in the yard or at the threshold. Morland's inn-yard paintings employ the building itself as a framing device — the inn's facade providing architectural structure for the human activity in front of it. His figure groups in inn scenes are informal and varied in posture, suggesting observed assemblages rather than posed arrangements.