Decorative lunette painting, commissioned for the National Competition Gallery (now Rooms 100 and 101). A. Morgan, Sketching from Nature, 1870. Lunette 7 for gallery 100, east wall (commencing from south end)

Four figures (one bearded man and three children) in interior that opens out on to the sky and a rainbow. Children shown drawing from nature (flowers and fruit). The fruit is in the right corner under a golden statue of a cherub. Signed 'A. Morgan' and dated '1870' in bottom right corner.

Conserved with the support of The Pilgrim Trust, with additional thanks to The Worshipful Company of Grocers

Sketching from Nature was commissioned to decorate one of eighteen lunette-shaped recesses in the upper portion of rooms 100 and 101 (at that time the National Competition Gallery). The lunettes were removed just before the Second World War and placed in store.

Historical significance: The National Competition Gallery (now rooms 100 and 101) in the East Ranges of the Museum was completed in 1864-65. At that time it was formed of two parallel top-lit rooms; these were used for the marking and display of work by art students in Department of Science and Art-run schools across the country. Richard Redgrave, who was placed in charge of the decoration of the gallery in 1863, proposed to commission paintings for the eighteen lunettes along the upper sections of the walls. The project, managed jointly by Redgrave and Henry Cole, continued for thirteen years; several lunettes were completed and in position by 1868, although work was not completed fully until 1876.

Broadly speaking, there were two stages in the production of the lunettes. Most of those created towards the beginning of the period were decorative, allegorical paintings carried out by art students from designs by Godfrey Sykes, Frank Moody, Alfred Morgan and Redgrave. A second stage was initiated in November of 1867 by William Frederick Yeames who contacted Cole and suggested that he should be commissioned for the project. Initial plans to commission other artists of the stature of Leighton, Watts and Poynter were scaled down, and the core of those chosen were historical genre painters from the loose association of artists known as the St John's Wood Clique: Yeames himself, G.D. Leslie, Henry Stacy Marks and D.W. Wynfield. Cole held a meeting with the artists to establish a theme for the lunettes, and, appropriately for a gallery in which students' work was displayed and judged, it was decided that the paintings should represent the practices of drawing, painting and sculpture in a programmatic representation of Redgrave's curriculum for art schools, the National Course of Art Instruction. The resulting subjects treated by the compositional canvases included life drawing, modelling from the life, study of anatomy, landscape painting, flower painting and still life drawing.

The various artistic activities represented in the paintings are set within relevant historical contexts; each takes place within the period and place considered to have fostered its inception or its apogee. So drawing the skeletal structure of the body is set in Renaissance Florence; still-life drawing is given a 17th-century Flemish setting; and landscape sketching takes place in 19th-century England.

This composition perhaps represents Thomas Gainsborough at work on his famous portrait of Jonathan Buttall, known as the Blue Boy,ca.1770 (Huntington, California). However, both the blue boy himself on the right and the two figures on the left, who also wear early 17th-century costume, are sketching, apparently from the landscape outside the window with a prominent tree and rainbow.

Alfred Morgan (fl.1862-1904) had a long association with the South Kensington Museum. He was a student at the South Kensington School of Art, and he later executed a portrait of Inigo Jones for the Kensington Valhalla project, which was made in English ceramic mosaic by W. B. Simpson and Sons and placed in position in 1868.

Morgan exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere between 1862 and 1904. His subjects were wide-ranging: still life (dead game, fruit and flowers), genre pictures, portrait, landscape, historical and Scriptural subjects.

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