Always susceptible to the ready comradeship, in the first consciousness of his brilliant easy powers, with his artistic ambitions bound up in his joy of living, Morland came quickly under the influence of Smith’s convivial yet energising personality. The publisher, urged by the public’s clamorous response, stimulated him to a prolific activity, and, with such engravers as Smith himself and the Wards to interpret him with masterly understanding and sympathy, and all the other engravers of note eager to do the same, Morland soon commanded the market--or, at least, his exploiters did. It seemed that Morland could do everything the public appeared to want, so, before he developed into the Morland exclusively of the stable and the farmyard and picturesque vagabondage, he challenged the popular _genre_ painters on their own ground, and beat them with the magic simplicity of nature. Could the domestic Bigg do anything in his own line as charmingly life-like as _A Visit to the Child at Nurse_ and _A Visit to the Boarding School_? Look at William Ward’s mezzotints of these pictures in colour, and then compare with their sweet actuality of scene and sentiment the same engraver’s version of Bigg’s _The Birth of an Heir_, with its scenic posturing and sentimentality. Then, what colour-prints of children could Hamilton or Stothard ever have designed to compare, for true suggestion of the bright buoyancy of childhood, with such gems as Ward’s mezzotints _Children Birds-nesting_, _Juvenile Navigators_, _Blind Man’s Buff_, _The Kite Entangled_; Keating’s _Playing at Soldiers_, and _Nurse and Children in a Field_; Dayes’ _Children Nutting_, and Tomkins’s stipple _Children Feeding Goats_. Morland enjoyed to let the children of the neighbourhood play and romp about his studio, and thus he could paint them naturally, with no self-consciousness on their parts and happy sympathy on his.