Frederick Morgan

Fred Morgan was born into a talented family of artists in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, and began his artistic studies at a very young age. His father, the painter John Morgan, took his fourteen-year-old son out of school to teach him himself in his studio. To his great surprise, one of the pictures Fred painted at the age of sixteen, The Rehearsal (pictured), was accepted by the Royal Academy in London, where it was immediately bought by a private collector. After this early success, however, Morgan seemed to lose his nerve and his career stalled. The turning point came when he got a job as a portrait painter in a local photographic studio. This awakened his talent and his interest in genre painting and sentimental child portraiture. He then achieved further success, became a popular artist thanks to his many reproductions, and also became known in the art world — by his death at the age of 80 he had exhibited more than 200 works, many of them at the Royal Academy in London.

From the page of The Apple Gatherers