In the first quarter of the nineteenth century David Wilkie, the English Knaus, was the chief genre painter of the world. Born in 1785 in the small Scotch village of Cults, where his father was the clergyman, he passed a happy childhood, and possibly had to thank his youthful impressions for the consistent cheerfulness, the good-humour and kindliness that smile out of his pictures, and make such a contrast with Hogarth’s biting acerbity. At fourteen he entered the Edinburgh School of Art, where he worked for four years under the historical painter John Graham. Having returned to Cults, he painted his landscapes. A fair which he saw in the neighbouring village gave the impulse for his earliest picture of country life, “Pitlessie Fair.” He sold it for five and twenty pounds, and determined in 1805 to try his luck with this sum in London. In the very next year his “Village Politicians” excited attention in the exhibition. From that time he was a popular artist. Every one of his numerous pictures—“The Blind Fiddler,” “The Card Players,” “The Rent Day,” “The Cut Finger,” “The Village Festival”—called forth a storm of applause. After a short residence in Paris, where the Louvre gave him a more intimate knowledge of the Dutch, came his masterpieces, “Blind-Man’s Buff,” “Distraining for Rent,” “Reading the Will,” “The Rabbit on the Wall,” “The Penny Wedding,” “The Chelsea Pensioners,” and so forth. Even later, after he had become an Academician, he kept to plain and simple themes, in spite of the reproaches of his colleagues, who thought that art was vulgarised by the treatment of subjects that contained so little dignity. It was only at the end of his life that he became untrue to himself. His reverence for Teniers and Ostade was not sufficient to outweigh the impression made on him during a tour taken in 1825 through Italy, Spain, Holland, and Germany, by the artistic treasures of the Continent, and especially Murillo and Velasquez. He said he had long lived in darkness, but from that time forth could say with the great Correggio: “Anch’ io sono pittore.” He renounced all that he had painted before which had made him famous, and showed himself to be one of the many great artists of those years who had no individuality, or ventured to have none. He would have been the Burns of painting had he remained as he was. And thus he offered further evidence that the museums and the Muses are contradictory conceptions; since the modern painter always runs the risk of falling helplessly from one influence into another, where he is bent on combining the historical student of art with the artist. Of the pictures that he exhibited after his return in 1829, two dealt with Italian and three with Spanish subjects. The critics were loud in praise; he had added a fresh branch of laurel to his crown. Yet, historically considered, he would stand on a higher pedestal if he had never seen more than a dozen good pictures of Teniers, Ostade, Metsu, Jan Steen, and Brouwer. Now he began to copy his travelling sketches in a spiritless fashion; he only represented pifferari, smugglers, and monks, who, devoid of all originality, might have been painted by one of the Düsseldorfers. Even “John Knox Preaching,” which is probably the best picture of his last period, is no exception.

“He seemed to me,” writes Delacroix, who saw him in Paris after his return from Spain,—“he seemed to me to have been carried utterly out of his depth by the pictures he had seen. How is it that a man of his age can be so influenced by works which are radically opposed to his own? However, he died soon after, and, as I have been told, in a very melancholy state of mind.” Death overtook him in 1841, on board the steamer Oriental, just as he was returning from a tour in Turkey. At half-past eight in the evening the vessel was brought to, and as the lights of the beacon mingled with those of the stars the waters passed over the corpse of David Wilkie.

Mansell Photo
LANDSEER.JACK IN OFFICE.

WILKIE.BLIND-MAN’S BUFF.

In judging his position in the history of art, only those works come into consideration which he executed before that journey of 1825. Then he drew as a labour of love the familiar scenes of the household hearth, the little dramas, the comic or touching episodes that take place in the village, the festivals, the dancing, and the sports of the country-folk, and their meeting in the ale-house. At this time, when as a young painter he merely expressed himself and was ignorant of the efforts of continental painting, he was an artist of individuality. In the village he became a great man, and here his fame was decided; he painted rustics. Even when he first saw the old masters in the National Gallery their immediate effect on him was merely to influence his technique. And by their aid Wilkie gradually became an admirable master of technical detail. His first picture, “Pitlessie Fair,” in its hardness of colour recalled a Dutch painter of the type of Jan Molenaer; but from that time his course was one of constant progress. In “The Village Politicians” the influence of Teniers first made itself felt, and it prevailed until 1816. In this year, when he painted the pretty sketch for “Blind-Man’s Buff,” a warm gold hue took the place of the cool silver tone; and instead of Teniers, Ostade became his model. The works in his Ostade manner are rich in colour and deep and clear in tone. Finally, it was Rembrandt’s turn to become his guiding-star, and “The Parish Beadle,” in the National Gallery—a scene of arrest of the year 1822—clearly shows with what brilliant success he tried his luck with Rembrandt’s dewy chiaroscuro. It was only in his last period that he lost all these technical qualities. His “Knox” of 1832 is hard and cold and inharmonious in colour.

Hanfstaengl.
WILKIE.A GUERILLA COUNCIL OF WAR IN A SPANISH POSADA.

So long as he kept from historical painting, art meant for him the same thing as the portrayal of domestic life. Painting, he said, had no other aim than to reproduce nature and to seek truth. Undoubtedly this must be applied to Wilkie himself with considerable limitation. Wilkie painted simple fragments of nature just as little as Hogarth; he invented scenes. Nor was he even gifted with much power of invention. But he had a fund of innocent humour, although there were times when it was in danger of becoming much too childlike. “Blind-Man’s Buff,” “The Village Politicians,” and “The Village Festival,” pictures which have become so popular through the medium of engraving, contain all the characteristics of his power of playful observation. He had no ambition to be a moralist, like Hogarth, but just as little did he paint the rustic as he is. He dealt only with the absurdities and minor accidents of life. His was one of those happy dispositions which neither sorrow nor dream nor excite themselves, but see everything from the humorous side: he enjoyed his own jests, and looked at life as at a pure comedy; the serious part of it escaped him altogether. His peasantry know nothing of social problems; free from want and drudgery, they merely spend their time over trifles and amuse themselves—themselves and the frequenters of the exhibition, for whom they are taking part in a comedy on canvas. If Hogarth had a biting, sarcastic, scourging, and disintegrating genius, Wilkie is one of those people who cause one no lasting excitement, but are always satisfied to be humorous, and laugh with a contented appreciation over their own jokes.

Seemann, Leipzig.
WILKIE.THE BLIND FIDDLER.