Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/351

Rh and the diction of Pope or Addison. The Jew's Harp," which was his next production, was less ambitious, and more in his own natural manner The same was also the case with The Cut Finger," in which an old cottage matron is performing the part of chirurgeon to a bluff blubbering boy, who has cut his finger in the act of rigging a toy-boat. In the following year (1809) Wilkie, who had hitherto been contented to rank as a pupil of the Royal Academy was made one of its associates. At the next exhibition of the Academy, however he sustained such a slight, as somewhat damped the satisfaction he enjoyed in his election. He had painted a picture which he called "A Man Teasing a Girl by putting on her Cap," and sent it to the exhibition, but was requested by the members to withdraw it. The only cause they stated was that it was inferior to his other productions, and would therefore be likely to diminish his reputation. It was suspected, however, that the true reason was professional jealousy, and that the academicians were impatient that a Scotsman, who only dealt in the "pan-and-spoon style," as they scornfully termed it, should have maintained the ascendency so long. Wilkie withdrew his painting, and digested the affront in silence. This he could do all the better, that for a year he had been employed upon his picture of "The Alehouse Door," and was anxious to bring it to a termination.

This painting, which was injudiciously changed in its title to that of "The Village Festival," was a great effort of Wilkie's ambition, in which he wished to compete with Teniers and Ostade. He felt that it was a daring attempt, but his indomitable perseverance was fully commensurate with the courage of such an enterprise. And few indeed of the uninitiated in art can comprehend but a tithe of that diligence which he bestowed upon the work till it was finished. After having decided upon the subject, he sallied out with Haydon in quest of an alehouse that might serve as the ground- work of the picture; and having found one to his mind at Paddington, he made occasional pilgrimages thither, until he had transferred it, with its accompaniments, altered and improved to suit its new destination, upon the foreground of his canvas. And then came the living models which were to be sought in the streets of London, and hired to sit to him, sometimes for a whole figure, sometimes for a face or part of a face, and sometimes for nothing more than a neck, a hand, or a foot. Then succeeded the altering and improving, the rubbing out and replacing, the obliterating, the touching and retouching, such as the most fastidious poets even Gray himself—never endured in the most finished and lengthened of their compositions. With all this his journal of 1809-10 is filled, and an astounding record it certainly is of the patience and labour bestowed upon a work of art upon that which is commonly regarded as nothing higher than a mere object of pleasurable but passing excitement. At first, he had purposed to paint nothing more than a group of rustics carousing at an alehouse door, and had gone onward as Burns himself had often done after the muse had been fairly stirred, until

A sermon Wilkie's painting certainly became, both in its elaborate character and moral power. The figures multiplied under his creative hand, each assumed a language of its own, and the sum of all was a most eloquent exposition of the pleasures of social enjoyment, coupled with dissuasives against excess. No one, however unskilled in art, can fail to remark how the lesson is fully brought