WILKIE, Sir David

In London’s Royal Academy in 1822, so enthusiastic was the crowd that pressed around Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch that rails had to be put up to protect it. The painting celebrated the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Wilkie had his order for the painting from the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo. Wilkie, who was merely asked by the duke for a picture of old soldiers outside a public house, raised his game to produce his masterpiece, a work that at once celebrated his patron’s victory and brought this decisive contemporary event within the realm of familiar experience by depicting the impact of its announcement on a crowd in a London street.

Josephine is represented as a young woman in Martinique, hearing the fortune-teller reading her palm predict her elevation to Empress. The subject is taken from Josephine’s Memoirs of Napoleon, which appeared in 1829.

Narrative painting was fashionable in Britain, and one of the most celebrated painters in this genre was Sir David Wilkie. The Reading the Will was commissioned by the King of Bavaria, Max I Joseph, and it immediately made the artist famous.

Wilkie’s visit to Jerusalem, culminating with his death off Gibraltar on his way home in 1841, was intended to furnish more accurate documentation for biblical subjects, which he saw as the logical conclusion of his progress from narrative to historical painting. The beautiful coloured studies of the people he encountered, mainly in Constantinople where he was delayed for some time, were incidental to this greater ambition.

The artist had a distinguished career within royal circles, succeeding Sir Henry Raeburn as Limner to George IV for Scotland in 1823 and Sir Thomas Lawrence as Principal Painter to the king in 1830. He held this second post during the reigns of William IV and Queen Victoria.

The Defence of Saragossa forms part of a group of four paintings purchased by George IV in 1829-30 and still in the Royal Collection. The other paintings are The Spanish Posada: a Guerilla Council of War, The Guerilla’s Departure and The Guerilla’s Return.

The four paintings illustrate a decisive moment in the development of Wilkie’s style. His early reputation had been based on genre pictures, mainly of scenes from Scottish life painted in the tradition of Teniers or Ostade, but an extended visit to the Continent in 1825-8, prompted by illness and the need for fresh inspiration, enabled the artist to study the works of major European painters, encouraging him to undertake more expansive historical subjects such as The Defence of Saragossa. Here the bolder composition - conceived on a larger scale - the vigorous handling and fresher colouring are clearly evident. These new aspects of Wilkie’s style were derived from his attentive examination of works by Titian, Rubens, Vel�zquez and Murillo while on the Continent and particularly in Spain.

The subjects of the four pictures were inspired by the Spanish insurrection against Napoleon’s occupying force. The Spanish defiance of the French is a theme widely recorded in contemporary prose and poetry, partly as a result of the role played by the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War of 1808-14. Of the paintings by Wilkie three are imaginary, but The Defence of Saragossa is based on a specific incident when the French laid siege to the city from June to August 1808. The composition depicts the Spanish guerilla leader, Don Jose Rebolado Palafox y Melci (1775-1847), and the Augustinian friar, Father Consolacion, who together have aimed the gun on the French column at the Convent of Santa Engracia, near the Portillo Gate. The moment shown is that when Agostina Zaragoza, the wife of the gunner dying in the lower left corner, seizes the lighted match and fires the gun at the encroaching forces. Wilkie was able to study the head of Palafox from life while he was in Madrid (Palafox was also painted by Goya [Madrid, Prado]). The priest, Boggiero, another hero of the Spanish resistance, is seen writing a dispatch on the left.

Wilkie also discussed his ideas for these pictures with Delacroix in Paris on his return journey from Spain. Indeed, The Defence of Saragossa has been described by one writer as ‘this country’s answer to Delacroix’s Liberty at the Barricades’. The heroine of the picture, known thenceforth as the Maid of Saragossa, became a celebrity in Europe, and Byron extols her heroism in the first canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (stanzas 54-9).

Wilkie’s inaccuracy as a portrait painter incurred the wrath of the young Queen Victoria and led to his dismissal on account of the failure of his State Portrait and The First Council of Queen Victoria. which she described with characteristic forthrightness as ‘one of the worst pictures I have ever seen, both as to painting and likenesses’.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 6 minutes):

Sir Edward Elgar: Pomp and Circumstance March op. 39 No. 1