|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sir David Wilkie |
|
|
|
|
Self portrait of Sir David Wilkie aged about 20 |
|
|
|
|
|
Sir David Wilkie, (born November 18,
1785, Cults, Fife, Scotland—died June 1, 1841, at sea near
Gibraltar), British genre and portrait painter and draftsman known
for his anecdotal style.
Wilkie, who had studied in
Edinburgh, entered the Royal Academy schools in London in 1805,
exhibited there from 1806, and was elected a royal academician in
1811. His first important painting, Pitlessie Fair (1804), was a
genre picture in the Dutch manner owing much to the works of David
Teniers the Younger and Adriaen van Ostade. It set the style that
Wilkie was to pursue for the next 20 years, in which he recorded
humble rural interiors and their occupants with shrewd character
observation and keen attention to detail. His genre pictures
achieved such success that the Chelsea Pensioners Reading the
Waterloo Despatch, when exhibited in the Royal Academy exhibition of
1822, had to be protected by barriers from the crowds of admirers.
A crucial change in his style
occurred from 1825 to 1828, when for reasons of health he visited
Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain. Particularly impressed by
the Spanish painters Diego Velázquez and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo,
he developed a broader and bolder style and a stronger use of colour.
This second manner was criticized by many of his contemporaries, who
missed his earlier genre style, but the history paintings and
portraits that Wilkie created at this time have a Romantic boldness
that appeals to modern viewers.
Wilkie succeeded Sir Thomas
Lawrence as painter to the king in 1830 and was knighted in 1836. In
1840 he visited the Holy Land to familiarize himself with the true
background to religious painting, thereby anticipating William
Holman Hunt. He died on the return journey, and his burial at sea is
commemorated in J.M.W. Turner’s painting Peace: Burial at Sea
(1841).
Encyclopædia Britannica |
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Village
Politicians"
1806 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch
1818-22
Oil on canvas, 97 x 158 cm
Wellington Museum, Apsley House, London
The Defence of Saragossa
1828
Oil on canvas, 94 x 141 cm
Royal Collection, Windsor
Josephine and the Fortune-Teller
1837
Oil on canvas, 211 x 158 cm
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
The First Council of Queen
Victoria
1838
Oil on canvas
Royal Collection, Windsor
Reading the Will
1820
Oil on canvas, 76 x 115 cm
Neue Pinakothek, Munich
Sotiri, Dragoman of Mr Colquhoun
1840
Watercolour, gouache and oil over pencil, 475 x 328 mm
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Der erste Ohrring |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Blind Fiddler, 1806, oil on wood, Tate Gallery at London. |
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
