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

The present picture, a key work of Wilkie's early activity, was probably begun in 1817 and certainly finished by early April 1818. Cunningham states that Wilkie painted it for Sir John Swinburne and records the price paid as ninety guineas but, while there is no reason to doubt the figure, there is no evidence that the picture was commissioned by Swinburne, and it seems quite possible that he bought this at the 1818 Academy exhibition.
The open door through the wall on the left and the house beyond were first described by Wilkie, in reverse, in A walled Garden behind a House (private collection), a small work almost certainly painted in the summer of 1816 while the artist was on a visit to Little Bealings, the house of a Mr. Edwards in Suffolk. The architectural elements reappear, with minor variations, in The China Menders which was exhibited at the British Institution in 1819 (untraced since 1921). It is also interesting to note that, of the figures, the head of the old woman bears a resemblance to one in Distraining for Rent (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1815, where she appears in the group behind the table. The buildings as a whole seem to reflect those in Adriaen van Ostade's Cottage Doorway (Washington, National Gallery of Art) - a picture once in Thomas Hope's collection which Wilkie is recorded as having visited in 1806 and 1808, and probably again in 1809.
A drawing, described as The Well: first study for the Errand Boy, - chalk and pen and ink, was included as lot 6 in the Wilkie Trustees' sale in these Rooms on 20 June 1860 (7s. to Craig); and a sketch, which may have been in oil or watercolour, was included in the Wilkie Memorial Exhibition at the British Institution in 1842, no. 86. The present whereabouts of both these works is unknown.
Sir Charles Tennant, 1st Bt., who owned both this picture and the previous lot, was a prominent Glasgow industrialist and Member of Parliament, firstly for Glasgow (1879-80) and later for Peebles and Selkirk (1880-1886). Tennant was a Trustee of the National Gallery and formed a notable collection of pictures with the help of W. Morland Agnew who catalogued the collection in 1896. Like other collectors of similar origin he was principally interested in British painting and his collection included ten works by Reynolds, including the artist's portrait of Viscountess Crosbie (1777; San Marino, Huntington Library and Art Gallery); works by Gainsborough and Romney, Hoppner's Frankland Sisters (1795; Washington, National Gallery of Art) and other portraits, eight Morlands, a major Bonington, two Turners, and examples by Constable and Etty. Other works by Wilkie included The Spanish Girl, sold in these Rooms, 26 November 2003, lot 9, for £363,650. Among contemporary painters he patronised Orchardson, Walker and Millais, owning the latter's portrait of Gladstone. The collection was divided between Tennant's London house in Queen Anne's Gate, where the 'Tennant Gallery' was regularly opened to the public, and his Scottish Baronial mansion, the Glen, near Innerleithen.