David Wilkie

The first complete catalogue of the paintings of David Wilkie, one of Britain’s most significant and influential painters of the nineteenth century. This book catalogues in depth every painting by the Scottish painter Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841). Trained at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh, Wilkie moved to London at the age of twenty and created an immediate sensation at the Royal Academy with his Village Politicians, a scene set in a Scottish inn during the French Revolution. Wilkie created paintings that demanded to be read like novels, his cast of characters based on an extraordinary skill in painting expressions and honed by intense study of costume and settings. Even as his style changed, Wilkie enjoyed celebrity and the patronage of royalty, aristocracy and dedicated collectors. Engravings spread his work to every corner of Europe and the USA. In his lifetime, among British painters his fame far exceeded that of Constable, who modelled for Wilkie, and Turner, whose deep respect for the Scotsman was enshrined in his famous Peace, Burial at Sea. Over fifty years in the making, this catalogue brings together the fullest-ever corpus of research on Wilkie’s paintings, the prints after them, the cultural influences on them, and the people that commissioned and bought them. Not only is this the essential guide to the career of the artist, it is also a rich source of information about the times in which he lived.