Collins, one of Morland's biographers, has given us a melancholy word-picture of the artist in these, his later days--besodden with drink, his face showing every sign of excess; nerves gone, sight failing, one hand palsied; yet able to produce works for which everyone clamoured.
Leaving his brother's house, he went from one friend to another. For many months he occupied lodgings in a sponging-house in Rolls Buildings, kept by a sheriff's officer named Donatty; here he was free to come and go as he pleased, yet was secure from arrest, and Donatty became the owner of a number of fine pictures.
It was soon after he left Rolls Buildings to reside with some other friend that he was arrested for the last time. The sum due was trifling, but Morland had no means of discharging it, and was conveyed to a sponging-house in Eyre Place, Eyre Street Hill, Hatton Garden. Refusing the offers of friends to pay the debt, he insisted on remaining in custody. He had frequently shown bitter resentment at the way his quondam friends worked him for their own advantage, and preferred to stay where he was. He strove to work; but the overtaxed brain and body refused, and while at his easel he fell from his chair in a fit. For eight days he lay almost insensible with brain fever, and then, without recovering consciousness, he died.
George Morland's was a singular character. His love of flattery and dread of affront may account for his choice of companions; he shrank from association with his social superiors, finding congenial friends among pugilists, grooms, sweeps, and persons whom he suffered to profit by his recklessness in money matters. Endowed with a keen sense of humour, whose artistic expression found vent in caricature, he found his principal amusement in playing schoolboy practical jokes. George Dawe hits off his character in a sentence when he says that Morland "never became a man"; throughout his life his faults were the faults of a boy and his virtues the virtues of a boy.
He and his wife were unhappy together and miserable apart. When he had a home she shared it, and if he had not, he sent her money--when he could. That he inspired her to the utmost with the affection he was able to engage from all who came in contact with him, is proved by the fact that news of his death killed her.