18 November: Boreham on David Wilkie

The People's Painter
This is the birthday of Sir David Wilkie. No artist ever understood better than he did the art of seeing things as the common people saw them. With naive simplicity and easy friendliness he transferred each skilfully-selected subject to his canvas and, when they saw it there, ordinary men and women felt that they were gazing, as in a mirror, at the reflection of the familiar scenes that had repeatedly intrigued them. This popular element in his work led to an extraordinary demand for copies of his paintings, with the result that very few academicians have ever figured in engravings and magazine reproductions more freely than has he.

Gallery Of Life
It is not too much to say that history can present few more striking examples of the intimate and essential connection between Life and Art than it offers for our contemplation in the person of Sir David Wilkie. To begin with, it was Life that taught him Art. Just as George Borrow, having scarcely read a book, began to write, so David Wilkie, having scarcely seen a picture, began to draw. The son of the parish minister of Cults in Fifeshire, the boy's predilections received scant encouragement at home, and it was with a wry face that his father eventually consented to his following his bent. Of the technique of draftsmanship he knew nothing. Standards and models he had none. Theories and principles were utterly foreign to him, and he had not so much as heard of their existence. Save for a crude print of a highland chief that had somehow found its way into his father's manse, the Scottish laddie had established no point of contact with the craftsmanship of the great world. But, to his boyish fancy, life was one immense picture gallery. He no sooner caught sight of a gipsy crone hobbling beside a caravan on the highway, or a crippled soldier lounging against the portals of a village tavern, or a ploughman leading home his team in the dusk, than he attempted to reproduce the scene with a burnt stick on a wayside stone, with his bare fingers in the yellow sand beside a brook, or with a lump of chalk on the plain walls of his modest home.

Boyhood Artistry
Following the instinct that surged within him almost from his cradle, he took to his art as naturally as a bird takes to the air or a fish to water. He often told his friends that he could draw before he could read, and paint before he could spell. Even as a small boy he loved nothing more than to stand and stare. The various shapes that things took, and the changing lights that fell upon them, fascinated him. For hours at a stretch he would loiter about the village taking mental notes of all persons and objects that were tinged with beauty, oddity, or quaintness. Even during the school recess he preferred to stand in a corner of the playground, watching his companions at their play to taking any personal part in their sports. Though only in knickerbockers, he was an artist to the fingertips. In his spare moments he drew sketches that he sold to his schoolfellows for marbles, horse-chestnuts, or slate pencils. The other boys delighted in the wizardry of his magic touch, for it enabled them vividly to recapture the romance of things that had vanished and that they never expected to see again.

Glory Of Commonplace
Having learned Art from Life—that oldest and greatest master—he sought to acquire the finer points of the craft at the hands of John Graham at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh. Sir William Allan, John Burnet the engraver, and others who came in touch with him in those days, have recorded their unforgettable impressions of the boy's inexhaustible keenness and indomitable perseverance. But, faithful to his metier, he preserved as a student the habits of his infancy. Whenever he heard of a village in which a fair was being held, or of a country town in the throes of market day, he made his way to a scene that was likely to enrich his fancy with so much that was colourful and distinctive. Cultivating this vein with such persistence, it was natural that his paintings should be reflections of homely and familiar things. His "Blind Man's Buff," his "Reading of the Will," his "Parish Beadle," and similar canvases present us with flesh-and-blood figures that not only carry conviction with them but offer a rich suggestiveness as well. They set the mind in motion.

The Vanished Charm
True, in the days of worldwide fame and European travel Wilkie was unable to recapture, like Browning's wise thrush, his first fine careless rapture. Falling under the influence of the old Spanish and Italian masters, he was less exclusively himself. He no longer gave us the odds and ends of everyday experience, the bits and pieces of commonplace life, the variegated smiles and tears of our most familiar environment, the comedy of the kitchen, the pathos of the street-corner, and the patchwork romance of ordinary, common or garden reality. He dealt rather in princes, pomps, and pageants and the new grandeur failed to stir the old emotions. Happily, he retained the knack of importing into the most imposing scenes those deliciously intimate touches that had entranced the admirers of his earlier efforts. Made an A.R.A. at 24 and an R.A. at 26, he was, the year after Waterloo, commissioned by the Duke of Wellington, at a fee of 1,200 guineas, to paint something representative of the battle. Two years later his Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo duly adorned the walls of the Academy. Nothing in the painting—perhaps his greatest—more delighted the public than the expressions on the faces of the women as they leaned from their windows to hear the exciting news, and the tense attitude of the near-by diner who, with oyster suspended on a half-raised fork, overhears the astounding intelligence. At the age of 55, Wilkie visited the Middle East. Having stayed at Constantinople, Smyrna, and Jerusalem, he painted at Alexandria a portrait of Mehemet Ali. Seized with sudden illness at Malta, he died at sea within sight of Gibraltar and, his body was sorrowfully committed to the deep.

F W Boreham

Image: David Wilkie