author
Thomas Morrison
1705–1778
An 18th-century English poet remembered for a spirited ode to painting, he moved through the worlds of school, Oxford, and polite letters before ending his days in Devon. His surviving work offers a glimpse of the literary culture that gathered around art, taste, and public life in Georgian Britain.
1 Audiobook
A Pindarick Ode on Painting Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq.
by Thomas Morrison
About the author
Born at Midhurst, Sussex, on 26 March 1705, Thomas Morrison studied at Winchester from the age of twelve and later went on to New College, Oxford. Records also place him at Oxford in 1723, where he completed his degrees in the following years.
Morrison is best known today for A Pindarick Ode on Painting, Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. from 1767, a lively poetic tribute that links him with the artistic and literary conversations of his time. Although he is not widely read now, that work has helped preserve his place among lesser-known voices of 18th-century English poetry.
He died in Devon on 20 July 1778. Little else seems to be firmly documented in the sources available here, but the outline that remains suggests a classically educated writer whose reputation rests on a single distinctive surviving poem.