Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/260

 note the strange figures of the high road, the broken soldiers and sailors, the pedlars, the beggars, and to transfer their pictures to a little book he carried in his pocket. At seven or thereabouts he was sent to school at Pitlessie, where he continued his studies of character. Upon the after-report of his schoolfellows he was quiet and kindly, bad at games, but ready to look on amused, ‘his hands in his pouches,’ and much inclined to ‘lie a groufe on the ground with his slate and pencil, making queer drawings’ (, Life, 1843, i. 13). Sometimes his studies would be portraits of his schoolmates, to be trucked against pens or marbles. At the commencement of 1797 he left Pitlessie for Kettle, two miles further up the Eden, and here he remained fifteen or eighteen months under John Strachan [q. v.], afterwards bishop of Toronto. Strachan describes his pupil as ‘the most singular scholar he ever attempted to teach,’ and says that ‘although quiet and demure, he had an eye and an ear for all the idle mischief that was in hand’ (ib. i. 14). At Kettle he learned something of weaving and shoemaking, and developed a mechanical turn for making models of mills and carriages. A sketch-book of this date gives evidence of his ruling passion, but affords little indication of his future bent. It includes a portrait of himself, in which he is shown as ‘round-faced, and somewhat chubby.’

His father would doubtless have preferred that his son should follow his own calling. But by the time the boy was fourteen his family had reluctantly convinced themselves that his heart was set on painting. Equipped with an introduction from the Earl of Leven to George Thomson [q. v.], the secretary of the Trustees' Academy of Design, he set out in November 1799 for Edinburgh. The specimens of his powers which he carried with him for credentials were not considered remarkable, and his patron had to intervene in order to secure his admission to the school, then presided over by John Graham (1754–1817) [q. v.] Young Wilkie established himself up two pair of stairs in Nicholson Street, and straightway began the (to him) novel experience of drawing from the antique. His first efforts were apparently only moderately successful, for there is a pleasant legend that a matter-of-fact Cults elder being shown one of the boy's performances failed to recognise its resemblance to a human foot. ‘A foot! it's mair like a fluke’ [i.e. a flounder], said this candid critic. But it is recorded that the young artist was already remarkable for an unusual determination to know everything about the objects which he drew, a matter of no small importance. Among his fellow-students were John Burnet [q. v.], afterwards one of the most successful of his engravers, and Sir William Allan [q. v.] In the St. James's Square Academy Wilkie was not without successes. One of his pictures was a scene from ‘Macbeth;’ another, which gained him a ten-guinea premium, depicted ‘Calisto in the Bath of Diana,’ subjects which seem unexpected preludes to the ‘Rent Day’ and the ‘Penny Wedding.’ But through all these essays his art was progressing in its foregone direction. His application was intense, his cultus of the cast and life unwearied, and at ‘trystes, fairs, and market places’ he was always industriously furnishing his ‘study of imagination.’

While at the Trustees' Academy he made some progress in portrait-painting, miniature and otherwise; and he executed two small illustrative pictures, one borrowed from Allan Ramsay's ‘Gentle Shepherd,’ the other from the ‘Douglas’ of John Home. But in 1804 he finally took leave of the Edinburgh school and returned to Cults, to begin almost immediately, with a chest of drawers for easel and a larger canvas than hitherto, his first important composition. He had hesitated between a country fair and a field preaching, but ultimately decided upon the former. He had his models round about him on the countryside, and into ‘Pitlessie Fair,’ as it was ultimately called, he introduced several members of his own family. His father in particular, who was represented talking to a publican, was only ingeniously consoled for that equivocal proceeding by the suggestion that he was warning the other to keep a decorous house. ‘Pitlessie Fair’ brought great local renown to the young artist at the manse, and a discerning spaewife predicted that as there had been a Sir David Lindsay in poetry, so in painting there would be a Sir David Wilkie. What was more to the point, Wilkie sold his work to a Fife gentleman, Mr. Kinnear of Kinloch, for 25l. He then tried his fortune as a portrait-painter at Aberdeen and two or three other places with small success, and on 20 May 1805 he embarked in a Leith packet boat for London. With him he carried for sale a small picture called the ‘Bounty Money; or, the Village Recruit,’ which he had painted at Cults.

By this time he was in his twentieth year. After a preliminary sojourn in Aldgate he established himself in the parlour of a coal-merchant at No. 8 Norton Street (now Bolsover Street), Portland Road. He had some letters of introduction, one of which, from Sir George Sandilands to Caleb Whitefoord [q. v.],