Sir David Wilkie
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David Wilkie - Remarks on Painting (published posthumously in 1843)
He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, the minister of Cults, Fifeshire, and studied in Edinburgh. As a boy he diligently studied prints after Van Ostrade and Teniers. His first important work, painted when he was 19, was Pitlessie Fair (1804: Edinburgh, NG) which is a remarkably accomplished essay in the manner of Teniers. In 1805 he entered the RA Schools in London and exhibited his Village Politicians in the RA of 1806. This made his name and led to his treating similar subjects in the style of Ostade or Teniers for some twenty years. These 'Dutch' genre scenes had great influence in Germany: he received a commission from the King of Bavaria in 1819 for Reading the Will (Munich). He was elected ARA in 1809, RA in 1811, succeeded Lawrence as Painter to the King in 1830, and was knighted in 1836. He was a friend of Haydon - although he had the sense not to attempt Haydon's High Art - and they went to Paris together in 1814 to see the pictures looted by Napoleon. He was most impressed by Rubens and by Rembrandt, especially in his drawings.
The Prince Regent himself purchased two important works, The Penny Wedding (1819) and Blind Man's Buff. The latter is indebted to Van Ostade in composition and handling, and also to the French narrative tradition.
He excelled at small-scale cabinet-sized pictures, The Refusal (1814: London, V&A) being a prime example. This painting was inspired by Robert Burns's poem about the wooing by Duncan Gray of the 'Haughty Hizzie Meg ... deaf as Ailsa Crag'. Wilkie's sister sat as the model for Meg, his friend William Mulready for Duncan Grey and Mulready's parents as Meg's mother and father.
To commemorate the defeat of Napoleon the Duke of Wellington commissioned Wilkie in 1816 to paint Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo (1822: London, Wellington Mus.). The Duke had originally suggested a small picture on the theme of 'British Soldiers Regaling at Chelsea', and it was Wilkie's idea to introduce the dramatic event of nthe arrival of the news of the great British victory. Wilkie took immense pains with the crowded scene, constructing a box within which he experimented with small model figures in order to resolve the composition. The work took 5 years to complete, and Wilkie asked the then huge price of 1,200 guineas for it, to the chagrin of the Duke, who insisted on paying in bank notes rather than by cheque, in order that the clerk at his bank, Coutts, should not think him 'a damn fool for paying so much for a picture'.
When the painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1822 it was an immense success: high and low flocked to see it, enraptured by its patriotic subject. So great were the crowds that for the first time in the history of the Academy, a barrier had to be erected in order to protect the work.
Because of ill-health he spent 1825-8 in Italy, Austria, Germany and Spain, and his new experience of Italian and Spanish art led to a great style change; Velazquez and Murillo being the principal influences on the new broader manner and change of subject-matter, which included several histories. He showed some drawings to Delacroix in Paris in 1825, who noted that Wilkie was 'unsettled by the paintings he had seen'. and he seems to have been the first British artist to see the Spanish masterpieces in the Prado. His style change was not universally approved, and even Haydon said that Italy had been the ruin of him.
In 1840 he went to the Holy Land and died at sea on the way home from a fever contracted while researching material for biblical paintings: his burial at sea is the subject of an imaginative composition by Turner.
There are examples in the Royal Coll. and in Aberdeen, Berlin, Birmingham, Cupar Fife (Town Hall), Dublin, Edinburgh (NG, NPG, United Services Mus.), Leicester, London (Tate, Wallace Coll.), New York (Met. Mus.), Riga, Toledo Ohio and Yale (CBA).
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