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Wilkie - Painter of Everyday Life
Review by Kate McCabe
This
wonderful exhibition of paintings by David Wilkie, the 19th century
Scottish master of genre painting, is entitled Painter of Everyday Life, but it is everyday
life from a very particular standpoint.
The early paintings which made Wilkie such a phenomenal success
when exhibited in the Royal Academy are of life seen through the eyes
of a son of the manse*, a conservative boy who only when much older
allowed passion to emerge in his painting.
The picture that made his name was Village Politicians, which shows a group of working men in a poor
cottage, engaged in political debate. The coherence of the discussion
is not being helped by alcohol and the men’s semi-literate struggle
to decipher the contents of a radical newspaper is portrayed in joking
manner.
It must have been a comforting image for the crowds of well-off
people who fought each other to get a glimpse of the painting at the
Royal Academy exhibition of 1806.
This was a time of revolutionary struggle, and the English
bourgeoisie was deeply split over support for the French revolution.
There was great fear that the revolution would be exported to Britain
and the people would rise in a Jacobin spirit. In Wilkie’s native Scotland,
in 1797 there was a major uprising of weavers and other working men
against conscription, which was brutally suppressed. In 1820 three leaders
of the early Scottish trade union and democratic societies were hanged.
What Wilkie portrayed was a nostalgic presentation of scenes
from his own boyhood and not contemporary life. Pitlessie Fair
was his first major painting, and though the influence of the Dutch
and Flemish masters is obvious, this is not one of Breughel’s village
orgies. It is the fair as Wilkie saw it when a young lad where excess
is portrayed with a kindly eye.
Wilkie is not the first expatriate to remember his homeland
through a soft focus lens, nor the first Scot to make a success in London
and never return home. From the Village
Politicians on, further paintings of Scottish life are based on
childhood memory, or evoked by scenes from literature, for example poems
of Robert Burns, with the exception of pictures made during a short
tour of the Highlands.
To give pictures authenticity, he used props bought in junk
shops and combed the streets of London for suitable faces for his cast
of characters. He built a little wooden model room where he would place
clay figures to work out the composition and light sources.
But in the end Wilkie has to be let off all charges because
of his mastery of painting and his wonderful ability to evoke believable
relationships – between the individuals and their surroundings and each
other.
- the reaction of every member of the family,
to each other and to the travelling fiddler, is totally believable and
charming
By 1824 Wilkie was becoming dissatisfied with his work, which
he felt lacked breadth and space. But experiments in a new style provide
unpopular, though looking at them now, they seem rather beautiful.
- one of the paintings exhibited in 1824 which the critics slated
and the public didn't like
In 1825 he suffered a breakdown, caused by frustration, overwork
and grief at the death in a short space of time of his mother and brothers.
He could not paint and instead embarked on a belated Grand Tour. Throughout
his life Wilkie had returned again and again to the Old Masters, and
in Italy he was bowled over by Titian and Correggio.
In some way this crisis proved a liberating experience, because
when he began to paint again he “came out” as a very different painter.
From medium-sized very detailed canvasses portraying scenes of domestic
life in muted colours, he began to produce very large and vivid pictures
of contemporary subjects not designed to win favour with conservative
British audiences. He spent seven months in Spain painting in a far
freer style, portraying Spanish guerrilla fighters, elderly monks and
handsome novices.
A striking example of the new style on show here is The
Peep-o-Day Boy’s Cabin, which shows a heartbreakingly young Irish
patriot, a member of the Home Rule movement, then sweeping Ireland under
the influence of the French Revolution.
This is a very different view of “village politicians”. The
young revolutionary is on the run. Slight and fair-skinned, he lies
sleeping on an earth floor cradled in his dark-haired mother’s arms.
The hut which is their home is bare, without a single stick of furniture
or any comfort and the woman is anxiously on watch.
Painted in powerful and vivid colours, the two figures fill
the centre of the canvas. There are no knick-knacks to tempt the eye
away from this central relationship and the painting has a real immediacy,
a sense that something tragic is about to happen.
I went to this exhibition armed with my own expatriate spirit,
expecting to enjoy the early works but to find these later paintings
slightly kitsch. But in the end it is these later evocations of a very
different genre of everyday life that have remained in my thoughts,
making me wonder what Wilkie would have made of his incredible talent
if he’d got out from under the shadow of the Scottish manse a bit sooner.
Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, Dulwich Village,
London SE21 7AD
*manse
– a house provided for a minister