Paintings and Drawings By Sir David Wilkie, 1785-1841 (Classic Reprint)

Cults, which lies about twenty-one miles to the north of Edinburgh, inN ovember 1785. His father was the minister there and his maternal grandfather owned the mill atP itlessie. His talents developed early and were ij, fired by a knowledge of engravings after the works ofT eniers andO stade and presumably Rembrandt. Taking scenes from the life around him he quickly learned to compose his figures in a lively manner, though the colour harmonies he used show clearly that he knew his Masters only from the hand of the engraver. His first major genre work wasP itlessie Fair (P late 6) which is remarkable for a largely untaught youth of nineteen, not least in the way he has stage-managed his crowd. Throughout his life he was to undertake portrait commissions, an aspect of his art which has been overlooked. His earliest portraits were somewhat in the manner of Raeburn, showing solidarity bvit lacking the sensitivity and marvellous insight of his later ones. In 1805 Wilkie moved to London. There is a raw tall, pale, queerS cotsman come there is something in him wrote John Jackson of his fellow-student at the Royal Academy Schools. This opinion was echoed by such patrons asS ir George Beaumont and Lord Mulgrave and admirers of Dutch seventeenth-century cabinet pictures. Certainly Wilkie sreputation was quickly made and his works won enormous popularity at the Royal A cademy, filled as they were with anecdote and humour though sometimes bordering on caricature. This tight and highly finished method of painting and drawing could not forever contain his ability and fluency. A severe illness caused him to leave England in 1825 on a protracted visit to Italy andS pain. There his brush work became looser and he found that It is richness and depth alone that can do justice to the material .H is new style found favour with the King and he never lacked patrons, but his popular
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