Both throughout his life and since, Sir David Wilkie has occupied an ambivalent, and occasionally paradoxical, position within the canon of British and European late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century painting. The span of his career alone prevents easy categorization, falling as it does neatly between the polemics of Reynolds and the aesthetics of Ruskin. He was a Scottish painter who forged a career in England and asserted a very British vision, yet art historically his principal legacy remains rooted to the Scottish school. His stylistic development confused, and even shocked, contemporaries and has left later commentators struggling to pigeonhole him within any recognizable milieu. Unlikely to be fashionable again, he is an artist nevertheless long overdue for a comprehensive analysis and reconsideration.

Nicholas Tromans takes on this challenge with verve and is admirably thorough in attempting to explore and dissect every aspect of Wilkie’s background and career. His principal goal is to position Wilkie in a pivotal position between eighteenth-century taste and high Victorian politeness. He casts the artist as forging a new vision of the everyday, a vision which is at once populist and accessible, yet at the same time grounded in a highly refined art-historical knowledge and a disdain of polished narrative. Tromans sees Wilkie not only borrowing from the European tradition of genre-painting, but reinventing it within a distinctively British milieu and—most significantly—doing so by establishing a rapport of understanding with the ordinary viewer, in essence offering his painting as a “figment of his audience’s imagination.”

That Wilkie emerged from a background similar to that portrayed in his early genre work and then enjoyed explosive overnight success at the Royal Academy in 1806 is a well-worn cliché, yet, as the author demonstrates, exactly true. The exhibitions of Village Politicians (1806), The Blind Fiddler (1806/7), and The Rent Day (1807) raised the “Scottish Teniers” to celebrity status, and in many ways the remnant of his career can be seen as a slow, if fitful, decline from this early ascendancy. In the opening chapter, “Everyday Stories,” Tromans rightly gives this period of Wilkie’s career considerable scrutiny. Indeed the nature of Wilkie’s art invites the sort of close attention contemporaries were used to giving genre paintings, and it is intriguing to discover some of the subtle and not-so-subtle subtexts in these early crowd-pleasing works. From the political implications of the newspaper on the table in Village Politicians to the constitution of the crowds in Pitlessie Fair (1804)—reflective of a country at war overseas, the strong and the youthful glaringly absent—we see an artist working at an extraordinary and precocious level of maturity.

As well as generic detail, Wilkie’s paintings offered a panoply of expressions and facial types. In the second chapter, Tromans explores the artist’s background in Edinburgh’s medical circles and in particular how the publication of Charles and John Bells’s four-volume Anatomy of the Human Body (1793–1804) transformed an understanding of human musculature and the way that facial expressions were created. The genre works are an exploration in miniature of some of the cutting-edge theories of human anatomy and physiognomy, and this alone helps to account for their extraordinary popularity when such theorizing was at a peak. It is perplexing, therefore, why, with a few exceptions, Wilkie was such a bad portraitist. This ability to deal with the general and not the specific may lie at the heart of the enigma of Wilkie, something that, however hard this book delves into the question, is never fully explained.

His was a career of two halves—before and after the Battle of Waterloo. The patronage of the Duke of Wellington and the production of Wilkie’s last great genre piece—Chelsea Pensioners Receiving the London Gazette Extraordinary of Thursday June 22d, 1815, announcing the Battle of Waterloo!!! (1822)—conceal a dramatic loss of consistency in the period between 1815 and his death in 1841. Pressured perhaps to sustain his meteoric rise in reputation, Wilkie cast around for subject-matter, looking to history and literature and thereby immediately removing himself from the more general human observation of his early genre work. Tromans charts his well-documented feuds with J. M. W. Turner, which began as early as 1808 (but ultimately—posthumously—found reconciliation with Turner’s depiction of Wilkie’s 1841 funeral, Peace: Burial at Sea). Turner’s subtle denigration of genre found more active voice not only in the polemicists of the Royal Academy, but also in critics and writers such as John Gibson Lockhart who belittled it as a “vulgar, novelettish art form.”

In truth, despite, or perhaps partly because of, his popular success, Wilkie was consistently at odds with some element of the establishment. Chapter 3, appropriately titled “The Shackles of Connoisseurship,” traces the delicate path artists had to tread to please buyers, critics, and fellow artists. If anything Wilkie tread too timorously. Unlike Turner, who imposed his vision on his public, Wilkie was perhaps over-responsive to conflicting demands. At the same time as he was dealing with the patronage of the Duke of Wellington in London, he was making trips to Scotland, apparently intent to reinvent himself as a Scottish artist. Moreover, he was a Scottish artist attempting grand Scottish history painting—an untried genre despite Sir Walter Scott’s burgeoning literary success—while at the same time (with The Penny Wedding of 1818) staging a revival, or possibly imitation, of his early genre successes.

The theme of attempted reinvention colors Wilkie’s late career. Seven months in Spain in 1827–28 resulted in a series of works influenced by the looser handling of Murillo and Titian, causing surprise when they were exhibited at the Royal Academy. Trips to Ireland (1835) and, finally, the Holy Land (1841–42) speak of an artist exploring his own identity as much as his art, an identity that seemed rooted in both the national and local associations of places and people. Tromans gauges the uncertain responses to the works Wilkie produced. Peep-o’Day Boy’s Cabin for example, a romantically cast depiction of—to all intents and purposes—an Irish sectarian terrorist cell was, understandably, “both greatly commended and abused” by the public when exhibited in 1836. However, the author tries to steer a steady course through this unpredictability, teasing the threads that could begin to draw it all together into some semblance of an evolutionary, or at least consistent, narrative.

Wilkie was derided for the lack of historical accuracy in his history paintings, but, Tromans suggests, he was not really painting history, but rather an ordinary person’s experience of history, or, as chapter 4 is titled, “Everyday Heroes.” This is where he sees the link to Wilkie’s early genre pieces; the artist is consistently searching for the “incontrovertibly real,” not the stage-set historicism of so many contemporaries. In essence it is the painting of everyday life again, now removed from a mundane to a grandiose stage, but still essentially engaging with the same shared experiences. Tromans’s argument almost convinces, but it fails to dwell at any length on the many atrocious paintings Wilkie produced during this period. In fairness, these tend to be instances where Wilkie moved away from the everyday and attempted to depict famous individuals: Napoleon (1836), George IV (1823), Sir David Baird (1839). In each case, the result is a forced, two-dimensional rendering that still surprises any modern commentator on Wilkie’s work.

The final part of Wilkie’s story—dealt with in the concluding chapter—is his rapid fall from fashion after his death. That he was adopted by the early Scottish art historians as a national painter is unsurprising since it was in Scottish painters such as Thomas Duncan, Robert Scott Lauder, and, ultimately, John Pettie and William Quiller Orchardson that Wilkie’s legacy was most significantly present. The emerging historiography of the Scottish School in the late nineteenth century sought exemplars of a distinctly “Scottish” painting from the early part of the century, a period when any artist of talent left the country at the first opportunity. Wilkie, with his humble rural origins and dramatic impact on the London scene, fitted the prototype and was described accordingly, and this appealing narrative has endured.

Wilkie is a difficult artist to attempt to explore or pin-down, and Tromans has persevered admirably. It is unfortunate that the publication—typical of the offerings of a press that does not specialize in art history—conforms to the stereotype of the academic book with a dense typeface only occasionally enlivened with a barely adequate quality black-and-white illustration. The grudging ten color plates in the center hardly justify the high price, and this cost will necessarily limit the audience of a highly readable volume. Nonetheless the book succeeds in offering a comprehensive and rigorous examination that explores—and, most importantly, frequently illustrates (if only in black and white)—many works that have either not been published or recently exhibited. As such it is the most complete picture yet available of an artist who dazzled and intrigued yet, ultimately, frustrated his public.