As a young artist, Morland copied the work of such 17th-century Dutch painters as Adriaen van Ostade and Paulus Potter, whose rustic scenes of country inns and rural laborers likely inspired paintings like Carters with a Load of Slate. Morland was clearly fond of the natural world, and his compositions often feature a variety of animals. He is said to have kept goats, dogs, foxes, horses, squirrels, guinea pigs, and dormice in his garden in the early 1790s.

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