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Lot Essay
We are very grateful to Professor Hamish Miles for providing us with the following entry:
This fine, small picture is the finished sketch for a well-known canvas virtually three times larger - The Village Festival, first titled The Alehouse Door, now in the Tate Gallery (see fig. 2). Wilkie began the larger picture on 29 September 1809, probably completing it by 19 August 1811; over these twenty-two months or so there were, however, interruptions. If this was not quite his largest work so far, as a composition it was his most ambitious. It came to be bought by John Julius Angerstein, a rich merchant, insurance-broker, and picture-collector.
In 1808, Wilkie had a visit from Sir Thomas Lawrence. With him came Angerstein, who gave him an open commission - 'Leaving time, subject, and price entirely to myself,' as Wilkie noted. In April 1810, seven months after the picture was begun, Lawrence saw his work and spoke of it to Angerstein who decided, without delay, that with this his commission would be satisfied. It is hard to tell the exact state of the picture when Angerstein made his decision, but he may have been given an idea of what Wilkie expected it to look like eventually by a sight of the present sketch. When the larger picture was finished, Wilkie was paid 800 guineas for it, about five times more than he had been paid for one before. It was not exhibited at the Royal Academy; instead, it took pride of place in Wilkie's one-man exhibition in 1812. A year after Angerstein's death in 1823, his collection was bought by the government as the foundation of a National Gallery. With his Old Masters, and with British painting otherwise represented by seven Hogarths and a Reynolds, came Wilkie's picture. In this way it was set apart in fine company. It was the first picture by a living painter to be in the national collection (it was transferred to the Tate Gallery in 1919); it was also for long the leading specimen of Wilkie's art accessible to the public. Thus it became celebrated, and much copied.
Wilkie's records of the day-to-day development of the Angerstein picture - published by his biographer, Allan Cunningham - must be the most complete for any of his time, and earlier. Most of his notes are, however, terse and some are not easy to understand, not least those alluding to sketches for the picture. That his allusions to them, which are not many, should be ambiguous in the main is due to uncertainty as to whether the sketch he mentions at a given time was painted in oil, or was simply a drawing. In establishing the composition, he used both. Accessible drawings for it are to be found in London (Courtauld Institute, and Tate Gallery [see fig. 1]) and in Edinburgh (National Gallery of Scotland); others are in private hands. Some of the drawings, as will soon appear, were made in the course of clarifying an oil sketch.
It is, nevertheless, possible to isolate references to a sketch, or sketches, which were certainly, or almost certainly in oil. After a first, desultory attempt to give shape to the subject in August 1808 - perhaps only in watercolour - Wilkie returned to it with a firm sense of purpose in March 1809. That he painted a sketch in oil not long after this is evident from a note he made on 15 May: 'Began to paint on my sketch of The Public House Door, and tried it on an absorbent ground'. This might, indeed, mark the beginning of the present sketch. On the 18th, Wilkie noted: 'Touched on the sketch of The Public House Door, for which I also made some drawings'. This sketch is likely to have been the one admired by Joseph Farington on the 22nd. It seems that it had by then acquired some substance, also that the final composition was defined in essence by 22 June.
Although Wilkie laid in the composition of the larger canvas on 29 September, using the sketch in doing so, he continued to work on the sketch. It was more than a preliminary; it held its value as an epitome of his intentions, and as a control in his elaboration of the larger picture. Thus he noted on 4 October: 'I put in today... two figures going up the stair in the background; the[se] I altered from the sketch, by putting them further up the stair'. The function of the stair, and the figures on it, was - as it is now - to allow a continuous flow of human activity from that in the left foreground to that in the background. He returned to the problem on 27 January 1810, and noted on 5 February: 'Was engaged for the greater part of the morning making a sketch [presumably a drawing] of my picture, with the amendment of a different staircase'. He abandoned this the next day, 'uncertain of adopting it in preference to my first idea'. Another idea occurred to him on 18 May: 'Busied all day making preparations for the figures in the staircase: I tried the effect of figures going up straight into the picture, and most of the stair turning to the right'. This was as soon abandoned, but still visible in the present sketch are traces of two parallel lines running down from the large facing window, and directed to the right; they may be the remains of this experiment. The solution, carried over into the Angerstein picture, came on 21st: 'Hit upon an alteration in the large window and staircase in the background... which has produced a wonderful improvement. I have moved the window much lower down; also the stair to the right hand of the picture, and the composition is made to flow with great ease to the end'. Again, signs of this alteration survive in the sketch; higher that the window as it is now, and to the left of it, are ghost-like figures at a window - or possibly standing on a wooden balcony.
Another aspect of the organic relationship between the sketch and the larger picture is illustrated by the group of figures above the porch, on the left of the composition. The group was evidently worked out at first in drawings and then painted into the picture; only after doing this did Wilkie note, on 3 February 1810: 'Put in the figures on the balcony in my sketch as I had done them in my picture'. What he forgot, in explanation of how in life they might have got there, was to indicate the door behind them, plain enough in the Angerstein picture.
Such alterations - among others yet - belong to the art of picture-making. But after the sketch lost its usefulness as a working instrument, which was possibly in May 1810, there can be little doubt that Wilkie did further work on it, if only to tidy it up. A governing reason for doing this lay in an odd agreement with one of his first and most loyal patrons, the Earl of Mulgrave. In 1806, Mulgrave, a Major- General, shortly to become First Lord of the Admiralty, had bought a picture from him and commissioned a more important one. In the following year Mulgrave arranged to buy 'all his studies and sketches for whatever pictures he may hereafter paint'. With these he intended to furnish a room at Mulgrave Castle, and to 'endeavour to educate his son to possess a proper taste for them'; Constantine Phipps was then ten years old. Wilkie was to be paid ten per cent of the selling price of each finished picture. Mulgrave thus acquired a dozen small duplicate compositions by 1812, half of them painted in 1810-11. At least four were not sketches for pictures, but reduced versions of them made afterwards for Mulgrave's purpose. He may have taken possession of the present sketch in about November 1811.
As Wilkie wished, Mulgrave lent the sketch to the Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1812; he also lent a sketch for, or a reduction from, the then unfinished Blind-Man's-Buff, which Wilkie was painting for the Prince Regent. These two small pictures were all that Wilkie submitted to the Academy that year, much as a defiant demonstration to that authority that he had work in hand of high importance. Meanwhile, the Angerstein picture, and the still incomplete picture for the Prince Regent, were prominent in Wilkie's private exhibition. Some at the Academy thought this an inpertinence since, earlier in the year, he had been elected a Royal Academician, and something more dutiful was expected of him.
Dutch and Flemish pictures were in high esteem at this time, and the collecting of them made fashionable by the Prince Regent. In the field of genre-painting, Ostade and Teniers were especially prized, and their names used in the critical shorthand of praise. Wilkie's composition offers itself openly as a continuation of that seventeenth-century tradition - with a sophisticated veneer from eighteenth-century France - but it does not depend on any one source. In this context a single figure in the sketch may have interest, that of the man leaning out of the left-hand corner of the window. He was replaced in the Angerstein picture. In part this must have been because his replacement establishes a positive link in the chain of human action across that part of the picture; but, as surely, his stolid presence was borrowed too literally from Ostade. Be this as it may, it remains that Ostade was there, in at least two different ways, during the development of the composition. On 9 December 1809, William Seguier, well regarded as a picture restorer and dealer, drew Wilkie's attention to a picture by Ostade, and to the transparency of the shadows in it; on the 23rd, Wilkie noted: 'Seguier sent me the etchings of Ostade'.
Several models, of both sexes and various ages, were used during the painting of the Angerstein picture, but given the reflective relationship between it and the sketch, the appearances of some of them are to be found here too. A man called Morely, apparently elderly, was the most frequently used; from 13 October 1809 to 8 February 1810, he served indifferently for the male figures in the principal group - on their feet to the left of centre - and for others elsewhere. John Liston, a friend, remarkable as a comic actor, sat for the figure of the man sitting at the end of the table on the left, a bottle raised in his hand. Wilkie had difficulty in satisfying himself with this figure, a pivot in the overall design. Liston sat several times, firstly on 27 October 1809; his features are recognizable in the Angerstein picture, but they were not put back into the sketch, for here we have a startlingly different man. The model for the architectural background seems to have been a public house at Paddington. It is clear that Wilkie made substantial alterations to it in the sketch, and again in the Angerstein picture - well before the last rural amenities of Paddington were blanketed under terraces in the 1860s.
In matters of detail, the differences between the sketch and the larger picture are many. More fundamental than these and, with little doubt, chiefly a result of the process of transfer and enlargement, is a certain loss of coherence in the Angerstein picture. There, the perspective of the foreground has become longer and steeper, the figures diminished in relation to their setting, more strung out, even more mannered in their rendering; some of this did not pass early notice. Comparatively, the sketch feels robust; the figures have, in general, a closer integration among themselves, and the overall movement in the design is rather easier to engage in. Such may be counted as virtues of comparative immaturity.
Wilkie inscribed the date 1809 on the sketch. His dating of paintings and drawings was not always literal. In this case, and probably with Mulgrave in mind, he gave the year in which he established the composition, rather than that in which his work on the sketch was ended.
H.M.
This fine, small picture is the finished sketch for a well-known canvas virtually three times larger - The Village Festival, first titled The Alehouse Door, now in the Tate Gallery (see fig. 2). Wilkie began the larger picture on 29 September 1809, probably completing it by 19 August 1811; over these twenty-two months or so there were, however, interruptions. If this was not quite his largest work so far, as a composition it was his most ambitious. It came to be bought by John Julius Angerstein, a rich merchant, insurance-broker, and picture-collector.
In 1808, Wilkie had a visit from Sir Thomas Lawrence. With him came Angerstein, who gave him an open commission - 'Leaving time, subject, and price entirely to myself,' as Wilkie noted. In April 1810, seven months after the picture was begun, Lawrence saw his work and spoke of it to Angerstein who decided, without delay, that with this his commission would be satisfied. It is hard to tell the exact state of the picture when Angerstein made his decision, but he may have been given an idea of what Wilkie expected it to look like eventually by a sight of the present sketch. When the larger picture was finished, Wilkie was paid 800 guineas for it, about five times more than he had been paid for one before. It was not exhibited at the Royal Academy; instead, it took pride of place in Wilkie's one-man exhibition in 1812. A year after Angerstein's death in 1823, his collection was bought by the government as the foundation of a National Gallery. With his Old Masters, and with British painting otherwise represented by seven Hogarths and a Reynolds, came Wilkie's picture. In this way it was set apart in fine company. It was the first picture by a living painter to be in the national collection (it was transferred to the Tate Gallery in 1919); it was also for long the leading specimen of Wilkie's art accessible to the public. Thus it became celebrated, and much copied.
Wilkie's records of the day-to-day development of the Angerstein picture - published by his biographer, Allan Cunningham - must be the most complete for any of his time, and earlier. Most of his notes are, however, terse and some are not easy to understand, not least those alluding to sketches for the picture. That his allusions to them, which are not many, should be ambiguous in the main is due to uncertainty as to whether the sketch he mentions at a given time was painted in oil, or was simply a drawing. In establishing the composition, he used both. Accessible drawings for it are to be found in London (Courtauld Institute, and Tate Gallery [see fig. 1]) and in Edinburgh (National Gallery of Scotland); others are in private hands. Some of the drawings, as will soon appear, were made in the course of clarifying an oil sketch.
It is, nevertheless, possible to isolate references to a sketch, or sketches, which were certainly, or almost certainly in oil. After a first, desultory attempt to give shape to the subject in August 1808 - perhaps only in watercolour - Wilkie returned to it with a firm sense of purpose in March 1809. That he painted a sketch in oil not long after this is evident from a note he made on 15 May: 'Began to paint on my sketch of The Public House Door, and tried it on an absorbent ground'. This might, indeed, mark the beginning of the present sketch. On the 18th, Wilkie noted: 'Touched on the sketch of The Public House Door, for which I also made some drawings'. This sketch is likely to have been the one admired by Joseph Farington on the 22nd. It seems that it had by then acquired some substance, also that the final composition was defined in essence by 22 June.
Although Wilkie laid in the composition of the larger canvas on 29 September, using the sketch in doing so, he continued to work on the sketch. It was more than a preliminary; it held its value as an epitome of his intentions, and as a control in his elaboration of the larger picture. Thus he noted on 4 October: 'I put in today... two figures going up the stair in the background; the[se] I altered from the sketch, by putting them further up the stair'. The function of the stair, and the figures on it, was - as it is now - to allow a continuous flow of human activity from that in the left foreground to that in the background. He returned to the problem on 27 January 1810, and noted on 5 February: 'Was engaged for the greater part of the morning making a sketch [presumably a drawing] of my picture, with the amendment of a different staircase'. He abandoned this the next day, 'uncertain of adopting it in preference to my first idea'. Another idea occurred to him on 18 May: 'Busied all day making preparations for the figures in the staircase: I tried the effect of figures going up straight into the picture, and most of the stair turning to the right'. This was as soon abandoned, but still visible in the present sketch are traces of two parallel lines running down from the large facing window, and directed to the right; they may be the remains of this experiment. The solution, carried over into the Angerstein picture, came on 21st: 'Hit upon an alteration in the large window and staircase in the background... which has produced a wonderful improvement. I have moved the window much lower down; also the stair to the right hand of the picture, and the composition is made to flow with great ease to the end'. Again, signs of this alteration survive in the sketch; higher that the window as it is now, and to the left of it, are ghost-like figures at a window - or possibly standing on a wooden balcony.
Another aspect of the organic relationship between the sketch and the larger picture is illustrated by the group of figures above the porch, on the left of the composition. The group was evidently worked out at first in drawings and then painted into the picture; only after doing this did Wilkie note, on 3 February 1810: 'Put in the figures on the balcony in my sketch as I had done them in my picture'. What he forgot, in explanation of how in life they might have got there, was to indicate the door behind them, plain enough in the Angerstein picture.
Such alterations - among others yet - belong to the art of picture-making. But after the sketch lost its usefulness as a working instrument, which was possibly in May 1810, there can be little doubt that Wilkie did further work on it, if only to tidy it up. A governing reason for doing this lay in an odd agreement with one of his first and most loyal patrons, the Earl of Mulgrave. In 1806, Mulgrave, a Major- General, shortly to become First Lord of the Admiralty, had bought a picture from him and commissioned a more important one. In the following year Mulgrave arranged to buy 'all his studies and sketches for whatever pictures he may hereafter paint'. With these he intended to furnish a room at Mulgrave Castle, and to 'endeavour to educate his son to possess a proper taste for them'; Constantine Phipps was then ten years old. Wilkie was to be paid ten per cent of the selling price of each finished picture. Mulgrave thus acquired a dozen small duplicate compositions by 1812, half of them painted in 1810-11. At least four were not sketches for pictures, but reduced versions of them made afterwards for Mulgrave's purpose. He may have taken possession of the present sketch in about November 1811.
As Wilkie wished, Mulgrave lent the sketch to the Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1812; he also lent a sketch for, or a reduction from, the then unfinished Blind-Man's-Buff, which Wilkie was painting for the Prince Regent. These two small pictures were all that Wilkie submitted to the Academy that year, much as a defiant demonstration to that authority that he had work in hand of high importance. Meanwhile, the Angerstein picture, and the still incomplete picture for the Prince Regent, were prominent in Wilkie's private exhibition. Some at the Academy thought this an inpertinence since, earlier in the year, he had been elected a Royal Academician, and something more dutiful was expected of him.
Dutch and Flemish pictures were in high esteem at this time, and the collecting of them made fashionable by the Prince Regent. In the field of genre-painting, Ostade and Teniers were especially prized, and their names used in the critical shorthand of praise. Wilkie's composition offers itself openly as a continuation of that seventeenth-century tradition - with a sophisticated veneer from eighteenth-century France - but it does not depend on any one source. In this context a single figure in the sketch may have interest, that of the man leaning out of the left-hand corner of the window. He was replaced in the Angerstein picture. In part this must have been because his replacement establishes a positive link in the chain of human action across that part of the picture; but, as surely, his stolid presence was borrowed too literally from Ostade. Be this as it may, it remains that Ostade was there, in at least two different ways, during the development of the composition. On 9 December 1809, William Seguier, well regarded as a picture restorer and dealer, drew Wilkie's attention to a picture by Ostade, and to the transparency of the shadows in it; on the 23rd, Wilkie noted: 'Seguier sent me the etchings of Ostade'.
Several models, of both sexes and various ages, were used during the painting of the Angerstein picture, but given the reflective relationship between it and the sketch, the appearances of some of them are to be found here too. A man called Morely, apparently elderly, was the most frequently used; from 13 October 1809 to 8 February 1810, he served indifferently for the male figures in the principal group - on their feet to the left of centre - and for others elsewhere. John Liston, a friend, remarkable as a comic actor, sat for the figure of the man sitting at the end of the table on the left, a bottle raised in his hand. Wilkie had difficulty in satisfying himself with this figure, a pivot in the overall design. Liston sat several times, firstly on 27 October 1809; his features are recognizable in the Angerstein picture, but they were not put back into the sketch, for here we have a startlingly different man. The model for the architectural background seems to have been a public house at Paddington. It is clear that Wilkie made substantial alterations to it in the sketch, and again in the Angerstein picture - well before the last rural amenities of Paddington were blanketed under terraces in the 1860s.
In matters of detail, the differences between the sketch and the larger picture are many. More fundamental than these and, with little doubt, chiefly a result of the process of transfer and enlargement, is a certain loss of coherence in the Angerstein picture. There, the perspective of the foreground has become longer and steeper, the figures diminished in relation to their setting, more strung out, even more mannered in their rendering; some of this did not pass early notice. Comparatively, the sketch feels robust; the figures have, in general, a closer integration among themselves, and the overall movement in the design is rather easier to engage in. Such may be counted as virtues of comparative immaturity.
Wilkie inscribed the date 1809 on the sketch. His dating of paintings and drawings was not always literal. In this case, and probably with Mulgrave in mind, he gave the year in which he established the composition, rather than that in which his work on the sketch was ended.
H.M.