A Girl seated and fondling a dove

George Morland's A Girl Seated and Fondling a Dove, painted around 1780 to 1804, belongs to the large body of tender, sentimental genre subjects that Morland produced alongside his more famous tavern and stable scenes. Morland was one of the most prolific and commercially successful British painters of the late eighteenth century, producing both the low-life subjects for which he is remembered and a substantial number of cottage and figure subjects aimed at a different, more genteel market. A girl with a bird — dove, sparrow, or goldfinch — was one of the most conventional of sentimental subjects, the bird's softness and vulnerability mirroring the girl's own gentle innocence, and Morland treated variations on this theme repeatedly. Such pictures connected him to the Continental tradition of charming female figure painting while offering British buyers an accessible alternative to the Dutch and French originals they admired.

The composition focuses closely on the girl and dove, their physical closeness and the tender gesture of fondling providing the picture's emotional content. Morland's handling is warm and accessible, the flesh tones built with the soft, creamy quality he developed from Greuze and from studying earlier British portraiture. The background is kept simple to focus attention on the figure.