The Dortie Bairn

SIR DAVID WILKIE, R.A. (CULTS, FIFE 1785-1841 GIBRALTAR)
The Dortie Bairn
signed and dated 'D Wilkie 1818' (upper centre, on the reverse)
oil on panel
6 x 5¹⁄₄ in. (15.2 x 13.3 cm.)

Executed in late 1816 or early 1817, the title of this painting means 'the sullen child'. The subject may loosely have been taken from one of the verse fables of Wilkie’s third cousin, the Rev. William Wilkie, entitled The young lady and the looking-glass. First published in 1768, these poems were intended as moral lessons. In this case, the young girl was meant to have been sullen and angry, until her mother gave her a mirror:

‘That it might show her how deform'd
She look'd, and frightful when she storm'd;
And warn her, as she priz'd her beauty,
To bend her humour to her duty.
All this the looking glass achiev'd....
The maid, who spurn'd at all advice,
Grew tame and gentle in a trice.’

In 1829 Wilkie wrote to the then owner, Sir Gordon Willoughby, asking to borrow the painting so that it could be engraved for The Amulet, an annual edited by Samuel Carter Hall, where it appeared opposite his cousin’s texts. A preparatory drawing for the painting can be found in Wilkie’s sketchbook in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Bought from the artist by General Sir Willoughby Gordon, 1st Bt. (1772-1851), on 4 July 1818, and by descent to his son,
Sir Henry Gordon, 2nd Bt. (1806-1876), and by descent to his daughter,
Mary Gordon (d. 1926) and her husband General Robert Disney Leith (1819-1892), and by descent in the family to their grandson,
Captain the Hon. John Disney Leith (1909-1968), and by inheritance to his wife,
Mona Leith (1910-1980); Phillips, Edinburgh, 7 November 1980, lot 100, where acquired by the following,
with The Fine Art Society, London, where acquired in 1987 by the present owner.

S.C. Hall, Letter to James Hogg, 25 June [1829], unpublished manuscript, Edinburgh, National Lib.: MS 2245/148-9.
The Athenaeum, 1829, p. 571.
The Gentleman's Magazine, 1829, II, p. 353.
S.C. Hall, ed., The Amulet: a Christian and literary remembrancer, 1830, opposite p. 101, engraved illustration.
W.H. Bartlett, The Wilkie Gallery: A Selection of the Best Pictures of the Late Sir David Wilkie, R.A., Including His Spanish and Oriental Sketches, with Notices Biographical and Critical, London, 1848, unpaginated, engraved illustration.

London, The Fine Art Society, Fourteen Small Pictures by Wilkie, 1981, no. 14.
St. Boswells, Mainhill Gallery; and Edinburgh, Bourne Fine Art, Wilkie Tradition: An exhibition of Scottish genre paintings of the early 19th century, 6 June-9 July 1983, no. 1.

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