Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/605

Rh W I L K I E 569 from the king of Bavaria, now in the New Pinakothek at Munich, was completed in 1820; and two years later the great picture of Chelsea Pensioners Heading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo, commissioned by the duke of Wellington in 181G, at a cost of 1200 guineas, was ex hibited at the lioyal Academy. The subject was a par ticularly happy one, and was carried out with the greatest fulness of incident and variety of character ; it appealed powerfully to the popular sentiment of the time, while the accomplished and masterly technique of the work won the admiration of the artistic portion of the public. In 1822 Wilkie visited Edinburgh, in order to select from the royal progress of George IV. a fitting subject for a picture. The Reception of the King at the Entrance of Holyrood Palace was the incident ultimately chosen ; and in the following year, when the artist, upon the death of Raeburn, had been appointed royal limner for Scotland, he received sittings from the monarch, and began to work diligently upon the subject. But several years elapsed before its completion ; for, like all such ceremonial Avorks, it proved a harassing commission, uncongenial to the painter while in progress and unsatisfactory when finished. His health suffered from the strain to which he was sub jected, and his condition was aggravated by heavy domestic trials and responsibilities. In 1825 he sought relief in foreign travel : after visiting Paris, he passed into Italy, where, at Eome, he received the news of fresh disasters through the failure of his publishers. A residence at Tdplitz and Carlsbad was tried in 1826, with little good result, and then Wilkie returned to Italy, to Venice and Florence. The summer of 1837 was spent in Geneva, where he had sufficiently recovered to paint his Princess Doria Washing the Pilgrims Feet, a work which, like several small pictures executed at Rome, was strongly influenced by the Italian art by which the painter had been surrounded. In October he passed into Spain, whence he returned to England in June 1828. It is impossible to over-estimate the influence upon Wilkie s art of these three years of foreign travel. It amounts to nothing short of a complete change of style. Up to the period of his leaving England he had been mainly influenced by the Dutch genre -painters, whose technique he had carefully studied, whose works he fre quently kept beside him in his studio for reference as he 1 tainted, and whose method he applied to the rendering of those scenes of English and Scottish life of which he was so close and faithful an observer. Teniers, in particular, appears to have been his chief master ; and in his earlier productions we find the sharp, precise, spirited touch, the rather subdued colouring, and the clear, silvery grey tone which distinguish this master ; while in his subjects of a slightly later period, those, such as the Chelsea Pen sioners, the Highland Whisky Still, and the Rabbit on the Wall, executed in what Burnet styles his second manner, which, however, may be regarded as only the development and maturity of his first, he begins to unite to the qualities of Teniers that greater richness and fulness of effect which are characteristic of Ostacle. But now he experienced the spell of the Italian masters, and of Velaz quez and the great Spaniards. His change of feeling is accurately marked in an entry in his journal during his last visit to The Hague. &quot; One feels wearied,&quot; he writes, &quot;with the perfections of the minor Dutch paintings, and finds relief in contemplating even the imperfect sketches and incomplete thoughts of those great Italians. My friend Woodburn used to say when we were in Italy that all collectors begin with Dutch pictures but end with Italian. &quot; In the works which Wilkie produced in his final period he exchanged the detailed handling, the delicate finish, and the reticent hues of his earlier works for a style dis tinguished by breadth of touch, largeness of effect, richness of tone, and full force of melting and powerful colour. His subjects, too, were no longer the homely things of the genre-painter : with his broader method he attempted the portrayal of scenes from history, suggested for the most part by the associations of his foreign travel. His change of style and change of subject Avere severely criticized at the time; to some extent he lost his hold upon the public, who regretted the familiar subjects and the interest and pathos of his earlier productions, and were less ready to follow him into the historic scenes towards which this final phase of his art sought to lead them. The popular verdict had in it a basis of truth : Wilkie was indeed greatest as a genre-painter. He possessed the keenest in stinct for the portrayal of what was around him, the truest insight for the effective selection, the artistic and telling combination, of the things that met his every-day sight, and were dear to him through life-long nearness ; but he was destitute of that higher and more recondite kind of imagination which &quot; bodies forth the form of things un seen,&quot; and gives life and reality to its re-creations of the past. It is, however, undoubtedly true that on technical grounds his change of style was criticized with undue severity. While his later works are admittedly more fre quently faulty in form and draughtsmanship than those of his earlier period, some of them at least (the Bride s Toilet, 1837, for instance) show a true gain and development in power of handling, and in mastery over complex and for cible colour harmonies. Most of Wilkie s foreign subjects, the Pifferari, Princess Doria, the Maid of Saragossa, the Spanish Podado, a Guerilla Council of War, the Guerilla Taking Leave of his Family, and the Guerilla s Return to his Family, passed into the English royal collection; but the dramatic Two Spanish Monks of Toledo, also entitled the Confessor Confessing, became the property of the marquis of Lansdowne. On his return to England Wilkie completed the Reception of the King at the Entrance of Holyrood Palace, a curious example of a union of his earlier and later styles, a &quot; mixture &quot; which was very justly pronounced by Haydon to be &quot; like oil and water.&quot; His Preaching of John Knox before the Lords of the Congre gation had also been begun before he left for abroad ; but it was painted throughout in the later style, and conse quently presents a more satisfactory unity and harmony of treatment and handling. It was one of the most suc cessful pictures of the artist s later period. In the beginning of 1830 Sir Thomas Lawrence died, and Wilkie was appointed to succeed him as painter in ordinary to the king, and in 1836 he received the honour of knighthood. The main figure-pictures which occupied him until the end were Columbus in the Convent at La Rabida, 1835; Napoleon and Pius VII. at Fontainebleau, 1836; Sir David Baird Discovering the Body of Tippoo Sahib, 1838; the Empress Josephine and the Fortune- Teller, 1838 ; and Queen Victoria Presiding at her First Council, 1838. His time was also much occupied with portraiture, many of his works of this class being royal commissions. His portraits are pictorial and excellent in general distribution, but the faces are frequently wanting in drawing and character. He seldom succeeded in show ing his sitters at their best, and his female portraits, in particular, rarely gave satisfaction. A favourable example of his cabinet-sized portraits is that of Sir Robert Listen; his likeness of W. Esdaile is an admirable three-quarter length ; and one of his finest full-lengths is the gallery portrait of Lord Kellie, now in the town-hall of Cupar. In the autumn of 1840 Wilkie resolved on a voyage to the East. In a letter to Sir Robert Peel he states that his object was &quot;to judge, not whether I can, but whether XXIV. 72