Morland rather defiantly declared that “the barn, the cow-house and the piggery” were his favorite themes, but he has another class of subjects, his numerous pictures of children, in which the out-door setting is of great charm. Reynolds had painted beautiful pictures of high-born, well-dressed children; and Gainsborough had given lovely, pathetic, somewhat idealized representations of cottage children; but Morland takes us into the realm of childhood itself, and his gay, romping lads and lasses swing on gates, play games, go nutting, sail toy boats, in the midst of most delightfully real out-of-door surroundings.[648] All that Morland does is simple, genuine, spontaneous, and has a permanent appeal, and his landscape without being especially beautiful or at all novel, has a sort of homely, intimate, and obvious charm. A survey of the century shows that there has been from 1700 to 1800 a remarkable change in the attitude of painting toward the external world. From a predominating interest in man as shown in history-painting and portraiture, with, at the best, landscape as an unimportant background or adornment, we come to a period when landscape is not only a very important element in portraiture, but is counted as so valuable in itself that figures take rank as hardly more than insignificant landscape detail. The development of the love of Nature is shown in painting in England somewhat later than in poetry: Thomson antedates the early English landscape painters, and Wordsworth’s characteristic poetry of Nature is somewhat earlier than the great paintings of Turner and, Constable. But in abundance and variety of theme the English landscape artists have, by the end of the century, surpassed even the poetry of the period. Pastoral England receives especially full recognition. The ocean is, however, comparatively unimportant as a source of inspiration, even as we have seen it to be in the poetry of the same years. Perhaps the most striking fact is the remarkable influence of mountains in reawakening the love of Nature. The most enthusiastic and original landscape work was based on the wild scenery of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the Lake District.[649]