Morland's art embraced great variety of subjects. His earlier popular successes were achieved by his figure paintings, and of these it is worth noticing that among the best were pictures which pointed morals he studiously ignored in his own career. The great popularity of W. R. Bigg's pictures of child-life led the dealers to persuade Morland to take up the same line of work, and in his pictures of child-life the artist shows himself what we know him to have been--a lover of children and one who had perfect understanding of them. The insight with which he portrayed children is only equalled by that which distinguishes his animal paintings. Morland's horses, ponies, asses, calves, and pigs, are entirely his own; they possess a character which stamps them as the work of one who had almost uncanny knowledge. He rarely painted a well-bred horse; the animal that appealed to him was the farmer's work-horse or the slave of the carter, and on these he expended his greatest skill. Only an artist who was also a horseman could paint the horse as he painted it. He has been described as a "pig painter," but this refers rather to the success with which he proved the artistic possibilities of subjects so unpromising than to the number of works in which pigs occur, though it is admitted that he was fond of painting such pictures. His asses and calves, in their kind, are equal to his horses; cows he seldom painted, and when he essayed to do sheep he was not conspicuously successful.
The composition of his works is rarely otherwise than pleasing, a point the more worthy of notice when we remember that he never made studies, but developed the picture under his hand as he worked upon it. The straightforward simplicity, the absence of subtlety of his art, may perhaps be in some measure an outcome of his method. His schemes of colouring were subdued rather than brilliant; one of his few principles of painting was that a touch of pure red should appear in every picture, and we very generally find it.
Once Morland left his father's roof, his artistic education in one sense ceased. He took not the slightest interest in the works of other painters of whatever period; on the contrary, he avoided study of art lest he should become an imitator; and went direct to Nature for all he required. To this practice we may attribute his originality.