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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 rapidly brushed sketch of Queen Victoria on horseback, a fine example of Wilkie’s instinctive and fluent technique, remains something of an enigma to scholars and admirers of the artist’s work. No composition connected with this study has survived and no compelling explanation for what it was intended has been advanced. It is, however, interesting to note that apart from the Queen’s equerry, shown following on horseback, the only other figures in this busy composition appear to be women and children, thus prompting speculation that the picture is a royal allegory. What seems certain is that it was not painted for an official commission. Although dated 1840, Hamish Miles, who noted that Wilkie would occasionally date his drawings to the year he parted with them, considered a more likely dating of 1838⁄9.
Intriguingly, the canvas appears to have been used by the artist on two previous occasions before the present composition was begun. The first abandoned work, which can be better seen when turning the canvas upside-down, shows the red dress of a seated woman, beneath which emerges a bare foot. Behind her, Wilkie has rendered a distant mountainous landscape beneath a milky sky over which he would later paint (for the present sketch), with beautiful fluidity, the mother stooping to gather up her child before the advancing monarch on horseback. This first study corresponds closely to the central woman in Wilkie’s The Peep-o’-Day Boys’ Cabin, in the West of Ireland (1835-6; London, Tate Britain). For the artist’s second composition, Wilkie rotated the canvas 180 degrees and began a portrait of Queen Victoria, shown wearing the Diamond Diadem made for the coronation of King George IV in 1821. Only her head, visible to the immediate left of the Queen’s black hat in the canvas’s third and present incarnation, and her ermine lined robes, are discernible, but it seems possible that this second study was in preparation for Wilkie’s full-length portrait of the Queen, dated 1840, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight.
The composition as we see it now would appear to be inspired by the work of van Dyck, notably two celebrated equestrian pictures in the Royal Collection. For the staging, Wilkie has clearly borrowed the Antwerp painter’s composition from his 1633 masterpiece: Charles I with M. de St. Antoine, in which the King is shown on horseback, framed by a triumphal arch. The model for Wilkie’s horse and perhaps some of the supporting cast of figures seemingly depend on van Dyck’s Saint Martin dividing his cloak (c.1620).
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 rapidly brushed sketch of Queen Victoria on horseback, a fine example of Wilkie’s instinctive and fluent technique, remains something of an enigma to scholars and admirers of the artist’s work. No composition connected with this study has survived and no compelling explanation for what it was intended has been advanced. It is, however, interesting to note that apart from the Queen’s equerry, shown following on horseback, the only other figures in this busy composition appear to be women and children, thus prompting speculation that the picture is a royal allegory. What seems certain is that it was not painted for an official commission. Although dated 1840, Hamish Miles, who noted that Wilkie would occasionally date his drawings to the year he parted with them, considered a more likely dating of 1838⁄9.
Intriguingly, the canvas appears to have been used by the artist on two previous occasions before the present composition was begun. The first abandoned work, which can be better seen when turning the canvas upside-down, shows the red dress of a seated woman, beneath which emerges a bare foot. Behind her, Wilkie has rendered a distant mountainous landscape beneath a milky sky over which he would later paint (for the present sketch), with beautiful fluidity, the mother stooping to gather up her child before the advancing monarch on horseback. This first study corresponds closely to the central woman in Wilkie’s The Peep-o’-Day Boys’ Cabin, in the West of Ireland (1835-6; London, Tate Britain). For the artist’s second composition, Wilkie rotated the canvas 180 degrees and began a portrait of Queen Victoria, shown wearing the Diamond Diadem made for the coronation of King George IV in 1821. Only her head, visible to the immediate left of the Queen’s black hat in the canvas’s third and present incarnation, and her ermine lined robes, are discernible, but it seems possible that this second study was in preparation for Wilkie’s full-length portrait of the Queen, dated 1840, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight.
The composition as we see it now would appear to be inspired by the work of van Dyck, notably two celebrated equestrian pictures in the Royal Collection. For the staging, Wilkie has clearly borrowed the Antwerp painter’s composition from his 1633 masterpiece: Charles I with M. de St. Antoine, in which the King is shown on horseback, framed by a triumphal arch. The model for Wilkie’s horse and perhaps some of the supporting cast of figures seemingly depend on van Dyck’s Saint Martin dividing his cloak (c.1620).