Making Art from the Common People

Abstract

It is now commonplace to regard the appearance of David Wilkie's The Village Politicians at the Royal Academy in 1806 as a watershed in the history of British art. Wilkie's dingy little picture of disputatious Scottish peasants not only attracted the excited interest of patrons, painters, and exhibition-goers, but also, or so it is held, inspired a profound shift in the way in which everyday life was represented. Out went the formulaic sentimentalities of the previous generation of genre painters and in came the potent cocktail of subtle characterisation, truth-bestowing detail and canny references to past art pioneered by the young Scot. For the next 20 years or so London's exhibitions were crammed with paintings of domestic life deploying variable mixtures of these core characteristics, paintings which, to judge from column inches in newspaper reviews, attracted at least as much interest as the landscapes alongside them. Despite the importance of...