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Lot Essay
For today’s lovers of British painting, the period between the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1792 and the birth of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in 1848 is synonymous with the landscapes of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable. Other British artists who in the early 19th century enjoyed fame far greater than that of Turner and Constable are now known only to specialists or indeed largely forgotten. Of none is this more strikingly true than the Scotsman David Wilkie (1785-1841). In his lifetime celebrated throughout Europe and in America (largely through the dissemination of prints after his work), a mover in the social circles of the great and good of the land, painter to royalty, knighted and showered with honours, Wilkie is probably now best known thanks to the shock of his sudden death on board a ship bringing him home from a trip to the Middle East, memorialised by Turner in his majestic painting Peace, Burial at Sea.
Wilkie came to London from his native Fife in 1805 at the age of only nineteen and within a year had created a sensation at the Royal Academy with his Village Politicians (Private Collection). From this defining moment, his career blossomed. His paintings of ordinary folk going about their daily lives tapped closely into the example of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, at that time much in fashion with British connoisseurs, but they also both re-invigorated and gave a new twist to the native tradition of genre painting embodied in the works of William Hogarth, Francis Wheatley and George Morland. For all their painterly qualities, Wilkie’s paintings in particular demonstrated unique powers of observation and narrative skill. Every figure in them – and in his classic works there were usually many – had their own individual story, with expression, pose, costume and accoutrements all carefully studied and playing their part in telling it. At the Royal Academy crowds flocked around the Village Politicians and its 1807 successor, The Blind Fiddler (Tate), revelling in their legible detail. Above all, Wilkie tangibly treated his figures with a universal human empathy. His fellow-Scot, Sir Walter Scott, and that English literary giant of the following generation, Charles Dickens, were to display in their novels the same instinct, which fascinated their contemporaries.
Wilkie’s artistic concerns developed as he matured, but the first phase of his work left profound after-effects. His work was at once, and always remained, in huge demand with collectors. The nation’s most committed aristocratic collectors and even royalty queued up for years to have their commissions fulfilled, which meant that Wilkie was always under intense pressure, a factor in exacerbating his already nervous disposition. Under these circumstances oil sketches played a particularly important role in his work. As many artists did, he used them as preparations for larger, finished paintings (in his case usually transferring ideas initially developed in drawings); but he also made other types of oil sketch. One such type was the private, informal or experimental sketch not initially intended for sale in which Wilkie explored unfamiliar motifs or techniques or was in holiday mode; and a second was the stand-alone subject of fewer figures than usual, simply painted on a small scale and rapidly because it lacked the gravitas and narrative richness of his larger works.
By making such sketches available for preferred collectors Wilkie eased the strain caused by the sheer demand for his pictures.
All of these types are to be found in the present group of works, spread across the present sale and the concomitant online sale (17 November-8 December). The first type, straightforwardly preparatory, is represented most obviously by the study for The Rabbit in the Wall (Private Collection) and the two royal portraits (online, lot 198, and current lot 46). In the sketch to the knees for the whole-length portrait of the Duke of Sussex (Royal Collection Trust) the preliminary function is relatively obvious, but in the late Queen Victoria on Horseback (lot 46) it is much more elusive. None of Wilkie’s other portraits of Queen Victoria, executed in his capacity as her Principal Painter in Ordinary, shows her riding a horse, but the artist seems to have considered this as an exercise in capturing a sense of regality before beginning work on his state portrait of her (Lady Lever Art Gallery Port Sunlight).
The second type of sketch, the informal or exploratory kind, is illustrated here by two works. One is the free copy of Titian’s famous Diana and Actaeon (National Gallery, London and National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) which in the artist’s day was in the collection of his friend and patron the Marquis of Stafford. The other is the View at Cults, somewhat untypical not only as a landscape, a genre for which Wilkie is little known (although he painted more of them than is generally realised), but because the artist’s trademark touch is less visible here than elsewhere in the group. Cults in Fife was Wilkie’s birthplace but the title is traditional and may be wishful thinking (online, lot 201).
The remaining seven pictures in the present group fall into the third category. Of them, the one that comes closest to Wilkie’s orthodox commissioned works is The Errand Boy, a simple everyday sort of subject of a sight seen commonly in the countryside, but with four figures ambitious enough to have commanded studies of its own, and to have been shown at the Royal Academy in 1818 (present lot 48). The picture was probably conceived on a visit to friends in Suffolk, and the open door and the view beyond reverses a sketch made there two years previously. The artist’s continuing indebtedness to Dutch and Flemish precedents is obvious.
The remaining six pictures in this group, all very small, are remarkable for being part of a series of twelve diverse subjects that Wilkie sold in two groups in 1817-1818 to one of his best patrons, Sir James Willoughby Gordon, who was successively Commissary-in-Chief and Quartermaster-General to the British armed forces. The Diana and Actaeon sketch above was a seventh painting in this group, and all seven – with the remaining five – remained together in a succession of collections until 1980, when they were finally sold individually. The most recent owner, who had begun collecting small paintings by Wilkie at the end of the 1970s and continued to do so until 2000, was able over the next few years to re-unite seven of them.
Alex Kidson
This fine, small picture is the finished sketch for Wilkie’s celebrated canvas: The Village Festival, first titled The Alehouse Door, now in Tate Britain, London (fig. 1). Wilkie began the Tate picture, a work that is almost three times larger than the present canvas, on 29 September 1809, probably completing it by 19 August 1811. If this was not quite his largest work to date, as a composition it was his most ambitious and came to be bought by John Julius Angerstein, the financier whose collection of old master pictures formed the nucleus of the National Gallery, meaning that Wilkie claimed the laurels of being the first living painter to be represented in the national collection.
Wilkie’s subject matter was ‘the drama of strong drink which he had seen performed in every alehouse from Cults to Canterbury’ (A. Cunningham, The Life of Sir David Wilkie…, London, 1843, I, p. 236) and, in particular, the drama of women coping with drunken men. The central character, shown being led unsteadily homewards by his family while his raucous companions wrestle him back in the direction of the pub, is a burlesque of Reynolds’s Garrick between the Muses of Comedy and Tragedy, a picture that was in turn a parody of Hercules’s choice between Virtue and Pleasure and was then in collection of Angerstein. It was the group in the lower right corner, appropriately adjacent to the artist's signature in the present panel, that Wilkie himself pointed out to the diarist Joseph Farington as ‘the Moral part of the picture’.
In 1808, Wilkie had a visit from Sir Thomas Lawrence. With him came Angerstein, who gave him an open commission - 'Leaving time, subject, and price entirely to myself,' as Wilkie noted. In April 1810, seven months after the picture was begun, Lawrence saw his work and spoke of it to Angerstein who decided, without delay, that with this his commission would be satisfied. It is hard to tell the exact state of the picture when Angerstein made his decision, but he may have been given an idea of what Wilkie expected it to look like eventually by a sight of the present sketch. When the larger picture was finished, Wilkie was paid 800 guineas for it, about five times more than he had been paid for one before. It was not exhibited at the Royal Academy; instead, it took pride of place in Wilkie's one-man exhibition in 1812.
Wilkie's records of the day-to-day development of the Angerstein picture must be the most complete for any of his time, and earlier. Most of his notes are, however, terse and some are not easy to understand, not least those alluding to sketches for the picture. That his allusions to them, which are not many, should be ambiguous in the main is due to uncertainty as to whether the sketch he mentions at a given time was painted in oil, or was simply a drawing. In establishing the composition, he used both. Accessible drawings for it are to be found in London (Courtauld Institute, and Tate Britain) and in Edinburgh (National Gallery of Scotland). It is, nevertheless, possible to isolate references to a sketch, or sketches, which were certainly, or almost certainly in oil. After a first, desultory attempt to give shape to the subject in August 1808 - perhaps only in watercolour - Wilkie returned to it with a firm sense of purpose in March 1809. That he painted a sketch in oil not long after this is evident from a note he made on 15 May: 'Began to paint on my sketch of The Public House Door, and tried it on an absorbent ground'. This might, indeed, mark the beginning of the present sketch.
Although Wilkie laid in the composition of the larger canvas on 29 September he continued to work on the sketch. It was more than a preliminary; it held its value as an epitome of his intentions, and as a control in his elaboration of the larger picture. Thus he noted on 4 October: 'I put in today... two figures going up the stair in the background; the[se] I altered from the sketch, by putting them further up the stair'. The function of the stair, and the figures on it, was - as it is now - to allow a continuous flow of human activity from that in the left foreground to that in the background. Another idea occurred to him on 18 May: 'Busied all day making preparations for the figures in the staircase: I tried the effect of figures going up straight into the picture, and most of the stair turning to the right'. This was soon abandoned, but still visible in the present sketch are traces of two parallel lines running down from the large facing window, and directed to the right; they may be the remains of this experiment. Such alterations - among others yet - belong to the art of picture-making. Even after the sketch lost its usefulness as a working instrument there can be little doubt that Wilkie did further work on it, if only to tidy it up. A governing reason for doing this lay in an odd agreement with one of his first and most loyal patrons, the Earl of Mulgrave. In 1806, Mulgrave, a Major-General, shortly to become First Lord of the Admiralty, had bought a picture from him and commissioned a more important one. In the following year Mulgrave arranged to buy 'all his studies and sketches for whatever pictures he may hereafter paint'. With these he intended to furnish a room at Mulgrave Castle, and to 'endeavour to educate his son to possess a proper taste for them'. Mulgrave thus acquired a dozen small duplicate compositions by 1812, half of them painted in 1810-11. At least four were not sketches for pictures, but reduced versions of them made afterwards for Mulgrave's purpose. He may have taken possession of the present sketch in about November 1811. Though Wilkie inscribed the date 1809 on the sketch, his dating of paintings and drawings was not always literal. In this case, and probably with Mulgrave in mind, he gave the year in which he established the composition, rather than that in which his work on the sketch was ended. As Wilkie wished, Mulgrave lent the sketch to the Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1812; he also lent a sketch for, or a reduction from, the then unfinished Blind-Man's-Buff, which Wilkie was painting for the Prince Regent.
Dutch and Flemish pictures were in high esteem at this time, and the collecting of them made fashionable by the Prince Regent. In the field of genre-painting, Ostade and Teniers were especially prized, and their names used in the critical shorthand of praise. Wilkie's composition offers itself openly as a continuation of that seventeenth-century tradition - with a sophisticated veneer from eighteenth-century France - but it does not depend on any one source. However, we do know that the specific influence of Ostade was there, in at least two different ways, during the development of the composition. On 9 December 1809, William Seguier, well regarded as a picture restorer and dealer, drew Wilkie's attention to a picture by Ostade, and to the transparency of the shadows in it; on the 23rd, Wilkie noted: 'Seguier sent me the etchings of Ostade'.
In matters of detail, the differences between the sketch and the larger picture are many. More fundamental than these and, with little doubt, chiefly a result of the process of transfer and enlargement, is a certain loss of coherence in the Angerstein picture. There, the perspective of the foreground has become longer and steeper, the figures diminished in relation to their setting, more strung out, even more mannered in their rendering; some of this did not pass early notice. Comparatively, the sketch feels robust; the figures have, in general, a closer integration among themselves, and the overall movement in the design is rather easier to engage in.
The catalogue entries for this and the following lot are substantially drawn from those written by the late Professor Hamish Miles at the time of the sale in 2000.
Wilkie came to London from his native Fife in 1805 at the age of only nineteen and within a year had created a sensation at the Royal Academy with his Village Politicians (Private Collection). From this defining moment, his career blossomed. His paintings of ordinary folk going about their daily lives tapped closely into the example of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, at that time much in fashion with British connoisseurs, but they also both re-invigorated and gave a new twist to the native tradition of genre painting embodied in the works of William Hogarth, Francis Wheatley and George Morland. For all their painterly qualities, Wilkie’s paintings in particular demonstrated unique powers of observation and narrative skill. Every figure in them – and in his classic works there were usually many – had their own individual story, with expression, pose, costume and accoutrements all carefully studied and playing their part in telling it. At the Royal Academy crowds flocked around the Village Politicians and its 1807 successor, The Blind Fiddler (Tate), revelling in their legible detail. Above all, Wilkie tangibly treated his figures with a universal human empathy. His fellow-Scot, Sir Walter Scott, and that English literary giant of the following generation, Charles Dickens, were to display in their novels the same instinct, which fascinated their contemporaries.
Wilkie’s artistic concerns developed as he matured, but the first phase of his work left profound after-effects. His work was at once, and always remained, in huge demand with collectors. The nation’s most committed aristocratic collectors and even royalty queued up for years to have their commissions fulfilled, which meant that Wilkie was always under intense pressure, a factor in exacerbating his already nervous disposition. Under these circumstances oil sketches played a particularly important role in his work. As many artists did, he used them as preparations for larger, finished paintings (in his case usually transferring ideas initially developed in drawings); but he also made other types of oil sketch. One such type was the private, informal or experimental sketch not initially intended for sale in which Wilkie explored unfamiliar motifs or techniques or was in holiday mode; and a second was the stand-alone subject of fewer figures than usual, simply painted on a small scale and rapidly because it lacked the gravitas and narrative richness of his larger works.
By making such sketches available for preferred collectors Wilkie eased the strain caused by the sheer demand for his pictures.
All of these types are to be found in the present group of works, spread across the present sale and the concomitant online sale (17 November-8 December). The first type, straightforwardly preparatory, is represented most obviously by the study for The Rabbit in the Wall (Private Collection) and the two royal portraits (online, lot 198, and current lot 46). In the sketch to the knees for the whole-length portrait of the Duke of Sussex (Royal Collection Trust) the preliminary function is relatively obvious, but in the late Queen Victoria on Horseback (lot 46) it is much more elusive. None of Wilkie’s other portraits of Queen Victoria, executed in his capacity as her Principal Painter in Ordinary, shows her riding a horse, but the artist seems to have considered this as an exercise in capturing a sense of regality before beginning work on his state portrait of her (Lady Lever Art Gallery Port Sunlight).
The second type of sketch, the informal or exploratory kind, is illustrated here by two works. One is the free copy of Titian’s famous Diana and Actaeon (National Gallery, London and National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) which in the artist’s day was in the collection of his friend and patron the Marquis of Stafford. The other is the View at Cults, somewhat untypical not only as a landscape, a genre for which Wilkie is little known (although he painted more of them than is generally realised), but because the artist’s trademark touch is less visible here than elsewhere in the group. Cults in Fife was Wilkie’s birthplace but the title is traditional and may be wishful thinking (online, lot 201).
The remaining seven pictures in the present group fall into the third category. Of them, the one that comes closest to Wilkie’s orthodox commissioned works is The Errand Boy, a simple everyday sort of subject of a sight seen commonly in the countryside, but with four figures ambitious enough to have commanded studies of its own, and to have been shown at the Royal Academy in 1818 (present lot 48). The picture was probably conceived on a visit to friends in Suffolk, and the open door and the view beyond reverses a sketch made there two years previously. The artist’s continuing indebtedness to Dutch and Flemish precedents is obvious.
The remaining six pictures in this group, all very small, are remarkable for being part of a series of twelve diverse subjects that Wilkie sold in two groups in 1817-1818 to one of his best patrons, Sir James Willoughby Gordon, who was successively Commissary-in-Chief and Quartermaster-General to the British armed forces. The Diana and Actaeon sketch above was a seventh painting in this group, and all seven – with the remaining five – remained together in a succession of collections until 1980, when they were finally sold individually. The most recent owner, who had begun collecting small paintings by Wilkie at the end of the 1970s and continued to do so until 2000, was able over the next few years to re-unite seven of them.
Alex Kidson
This fine, small picture is the finished sketch for Wilkie’s celebrated canvas: The Village Festival, first titled The Alehouse Door, now in Tate Britain, London (fig. 1). Wilkie began the Tate picture, a work that is almost three times larger than the present canvas, on 29 September 1809, probably completing it by 19 August 1811. If this was not quite his largest work to date, as a composition it was his most ambitious and came to be bought by John Julius Angerstein, the financier whose collection of old master pictures formed the nucleus of the National Gallery, meaning that Wilkie claimed the laurels of being the first living painter to be represented in the national collection.
Wilkie’s subject matter was ‘the drama of strong drink which he had seen performed in every alehouse from Cults to Canterbury’ (A. Cunningham, The Life of Sir David Wilkie…, London, 1843, I, p. 236) and, in particular, the drama of women coping with drunken men. The central character, shown being led unsteadily homewards by his family while his raucous companions wrestle him back in the direction of the pub, is a burlesque of Reynolds’s Garrick between the Muses of Comedy and Tragedy, a picture that was in turn a parody of Hercules’s choice between Virtue and Pleasure and was then in collection of Angerstein. It was the group in the lower right corner, appropriately adjacent to the artist's signature in the present panel, that Wilkie himself pointed out to the diarist Joseph Farington as ‘the Moral part of the picture’.
In 1808, Wilkie had a visit from Sir Thomas Lawrence. With him came Angerstein, who gave him an open commission - 'Leaving time, subject, and price entirely to myself,' as Wilkie noted. In April 1810, seven months after the picture was begun, Lawrence saw his work and spoke of it to Angerstein who decided, without delay, that with this his commission would be satisfied. It is hard to tell the exact state of the picture when Angerstein made his decision, but he may have been given an idea of what Wilkie expected it to look like eventually by a sight of the present sketch. When the larger picture was finished, Wilkie was paid 800 guineas for it, about five times more than he had been paid for one before. It was not exhibited at the Royal Academy; instead, it took pride of place in Wilkie's one-man exhibition in 1812.
Wilkie's records of the day-to-day development of the Angerstein picture must be the most complete for any of his time, and earlier. Most of his notes are, however, terse and some are not easy to understand, not least those alluding to sketches for the picture. That his allusions to them, which are not many, should be ambiguous in the main is due to uncertainty as to whether the sketch he mentions at a given time was painted in oil, or was simply a drawing. In establishing the composition, he used both. Accessible drawings for it are to be found in London (Courtauld Institute, and Tate Britain) and in Edinburgh (National Gallery of Scotland). It is, nevertheless, possible to isolate references to a sketch, or sketches, which were certainly, or almost certainly in oil. After a first, desultory attempt to give shape to the subject in August 1808 - perhaps only in watercolour - Wilkie returned to it with a firm sense of purpose in March 1809. That he painted a sketch in oil not long after this is evident from a note he made on 15 May: 'Began to paint on my sketch of The Public House Door, and tried it on an absorbent ground'. This might, indeed, mark the beginning of the present sketch.
Although Wilkie laid in the composition of the larger canvas on 29 September he continued to work on the sketch. It was more than a preliminary; it held its value as an epitome of his intentions, and as a control in his elaboration of the larger picture. Thus he noted on 4 October: 'I put in today... two figures going up the stair in the background; the[se] I altered from the sketch, by putting them further up the stair'. The function of the stair, and the figures on it, was - as it is now - to allow a continuous flow of human activity from that in the left foreground to that in the background. Another idea occurred to him on 18 May: 'Busied all day making preparations for the figures in the staircase: I tried the effect of figures going up straight into the picture, and most of the stair turning to the right'. This was soon abandoned, but still visible in the present sketch are traces of two parallel lines running down from the large facing window, and directed to the right; they may be the remains of this experiment. Such alterations - among others yet - belong to the art of picture-making. Even after the sketch lost its usefulness as a working instrument there can be little doubt that Wilkie did further work on it, if only to tidy it up. A governing reason for doing this lay in an odd agreement with one of his first and most loyal patrons, the Earl of Mulgrave. In 1806, Mulgrave, a Major-General, shortly to become First Lord of the Admiralty, had bought a picture from him and commissioned a more important one. In the following year Mulgrave arranged to buy 'all his studies and sketches for whatever pictures he may hereafter paint'. With these he intended to furnish a room at Mulgrave Castle, and to 'endeavour to educate his son to possess a proper taste for them'. Mulgrave thus acquired a dozen small duplicate compositions by 1812, half of them painted in 1810-11. At least four were not sketches for pictures, but reduced versions of them made afterwards for Mulgrave's purpose. He may have taken possession of the present sketch in about November 1811. Though Wilkie inscribed the date 1809 on the sketch, his dating of paintings and drawings was not always literal. In this case, and probably with Mulgrave in mind, he gave the year in which he established the composition, rather than that in which his work on the sketch was ended. As Wilkie wished, Mulgrave lent the sketch to the Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1812; he also lent a sketch for, or a reduction from, the then unfinished Blind-Man's-Buff, which Wilkie was painting for the Prince Regent.
Dutch and Flemish pictures were in high esteem at this time, and the collecting of them made fashionable by the Prince Regent. In the field of genre-painting, Ostade and Teniers were especially prized, and their names used in the critical shorthand of praise. Wilkie's composition offers itself openly as a continuation of that seventeenth-century tradition - with a sophisticated veneer from eighteenth-century France - but it does not depend on any one source. However, we do know that the specific influence of Ostade was there, in at least two different ways, during the development of the composition. On 9 December 1809, William Seguier, well regarded as a picture restorer and dealer, drew Wilkie's attention to a picture by Ostade, and to the transparency of the shadows in it; on the 23rd, Wilkie noted: 'Seguier sent me the etchings of Ostade'.
In matters of detail, the differences between the sketch and the larger picture are many. More fundamental than these and, with little doubt, chiefly a result of the process of transfer and enlargement, is a certain loss of coherence in the Angerstein picture. There, the perspective of the foreground has become longer and steeper, the figures diminished in relation to their setting, more strung out, even more mannered in their rendering; some of this did not pass early notice. Comparatively, the sketch feels robust; the figures have, in general, a closer integration among themselves, and the overall movement in the design is rather easier to engage in.
The catalogue entries for this and the following lot are substantially drawn from those written by the late Professor Hamish Miles at the time of the sale in 2000.