A highland interior with a bagpipe player

The subject of this painting derives from Wilkie’s tour of the Highlands in the Autumn of 1817. Unlike some of his studies painted on this spot, it is likely that this was worked up later from his sketches. It is the first example of such studies to include a figure in tartan. In a letter to his brother Thomas from his Argyllshire trip, Wilkie commented that ‘The young people [in this part of the Highlands] are almost the only wearers of the kilt. The bonnet has gone entirely out of fashion, and it is only on a Sunday they are ever seen in their full uniform, and then it is only the great beaux and smart fellows that wear them’ (A. Cunningham, The Life of Sir David Wilkie, London, I, 1843, p. 475). This picture objectifies this observation; the standing couple are evidently in their Sunday best, with the man’s tartan suggesting a MacDonald pattern. Both the wearing of tartan and the playing of the pipes were acts that carried a specific political weight, as they had been forbidden following the Jacobite rising of 1745, and were only legalised again in 1782.

A note on the provenance:
James Willoughby Gordon was 21 and a Lieutenant in the 66th Regiment of Foot when war with France broke out in 1792; he swiftly rose through the ranks, becoming aide-de-camp to the Duke of Kent. Royal patronage ensured further progression; he became a Lieutenant- General in 1803 and, the following year, military secretary to the Duke of York, making him one of the most powerful men in the army. In 1811 he was promoted to Quartermaster-General, a post he would hold until his death. It was not, however, Gordon the army-man who was important in the story of Wilkie’s art, but Gordon the amateur of contemporary British painting, though the two did intertwine at various points, with Gordon’s 1818 commission of Wilkie’s Portrait of the Duke of York (National Portrait Gallery, inv no. 2936) and its companion The Duke of Wellington writing a dispatch (Aberdeen Art Gallery, inv. no. 3599).

Gordon was a great collector; his own collection included three landscapes by Turner and at least twenty-five paintings by Wilkie, making him one of the artist's most important patrons. His wife, Julia, was also a renowned amateur watercolourist, who had sketched with both Turner and Girtin prior to he marriage. Indeed, Turner’s painting exhibited at the academy in 1826, View from the Terrace of a Villa at Niton, Isle of Wight, from sketches by a Lady, took Lady Gordon’s delicate watercolours as its starting point. As well as specific commissions from Wilkie, Gordon also acquired two groups of seven of Wilkie’s sketches; the first on the 18 January 1817, and the second on the 4 July 1818. These sketches were all kept together, descending in the family to Mona Leith, by whom they were sold in Edinburgh in 1980. Of these, the present lots 200, 202, 206 and 207 belong to the first of these groups and lots 199, 203 and 204 to the second.