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The Rosanna Settlers, by Hilda McDonnell

The David Wilkie connection
Chapter 6

Contents: introduction | chapters: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Journal | Sources

When Thomas Shepherd died in Sydney in 1835 his obituary in the Sydney Herald gave prominence to the fact that Shepherd “had been a school-fellow of the celebrated painter David Wilkie.” This artist, of Scottish origin but London-based, was one of the leading painters of his time and originally became famous for his homely scenes of Scottish village life. He also produced large scale historical paintings as well as portraits. Wilkie was eventually to succede Sir Thomas Lawrence as Painter in Ordinary to the King and towards the end of his life was knighted. The British in India had Wilkie prints on their walls.

Artist David Wilkie (1785-1841) came from the same area in Scotland as Thomas Shepherd. A memorial commemmorating David Wilkie was in the churchyard at Cults, Fife, where Thomas Shepherd was baptised. The painter was born in the manse at Cults to Rev. David Wilkie, then the minister of Cults, and his third wife Isobel Lister of Pitlessie. Thomas Shepherd’s parents had been married by the artist’s father.

Everything points to David Wilkie having been keenly interested in the New Zealand Company venture. By the time the Rosanna settlers left London Wilkie was King’s Limner for Scotland. The scenes of his youth which Wilkie recreated in his paintings were of just that area where a number of the Rosanna settlers were drawn from.

Young Wilkie attended the parish school at Pitlessie, then in 1797 went to the grammar school at Kettle. He afterwards spent a year at the academy in the town of Cupar, the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Fife. Cupar was only four miles from Cults. He then continued his education in Edinburgh. His father had also received a university education.

David Wilkie first made a name for himself with The Country Fair. The picture was later renamed Pitlessie Fair (1804). Pitlessie village was about a mile west of Cults. Early Wilkie sketches also included Crawford Lodge and Pitlessie Mill.

In May 1805 Wilkie went to London and soon afterwards rose to fame. His talent was immediately recognised by patron of the arts Sir George Beaumont and was nurtured by him. Beaumont was a former member of the Society of Dilettanti, a dining society which Sir Joseph Banks also belonged to. On the literary side Beaumont had also begun to support Coleridge and Wordsworth. Beaumont was to become a founder of the National Gallery. Lord Crawford also took an interest in the young Wilkie’s artistic career.

Wilkie’s work was to include other evocatively named paintings in the same genre as Pitlessie Fair: The Village Recruit, The Blind Fiddler, Rent Day, Blindman’s Buff, The Rich Relation, The Letter of Introduction, The Penny Wedding, The Reading of a Will, Grace Before Meat, and The Rabbit on the Wall.
While studying at the Royal Academy Wilkie became friends with Benjamin Robert Haydon, who was eventually to create such historical paintings such as The Reform banquet of 1832 and the Meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1840. It was Wilkie who took Haydon to see the so-called “Elgin Marbles,” newly removed from the Parthenon in Greece by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, and shipped to London. Elgin was a leading landowner of Fife. His son James, who became the eighth Earl, later married Mary Louisa Lambton (1819?-1898), daughter of the New Zealand Company director. James and Mary Louisa Elgin were to become the vice regal couple in Canada and James was destined to be British Consul in China and subsequently Vice-Roy of India.

David Wilkie was sketched in 1816 by Haydon and the sketch was later in the National Portrait Gallery. In London Haydon had a number of literary acquaintances, among them the poet John Keats, whose close friend Charles Armitage Brown emigrated in 1841 to New Zealand with his son Carlino. A poet friend of Keats was George Felton Mathew. George’s sister Sarah Louisa went to Sydney in January 1832 to marry her cousin, Felton Mathew, a surveyor. Felton Mathew came over to New Zealand in 1840 as acting Surveyor-General.

In April 1809 David Wilkie, then still a raw Scotsman, met William Westall, the artist on Flinders’ expedition to Australia. Richard Westall, a brother of William, was also a painter and prolific draughtsman (Royal Academy 1794) and a close friend of Sir Thomas Lawrence. He had lodged for a time at 57 Greek Street, where Lawrence lived with his parents.

In 1813 David Wilkie’s father died. He had been for over thirty years minister at Cults. Wilkie’s mother and sister came to live with the artist in London. Wilkie now visited Sir Walter Scott in Scotland and through him met the Scottish poet James Hogg, called the Ettrick Shepherd.

The writer John Galt (1779-1839) was another of Wilkie’s London friends. He left Scotland for London in 1804 and soon met up with Wilkie. It was to Wilkie that Galt showed his manuscript The annals of the parish (1821). Galt’s novel The member (1832) was all about a man who goes abroad and returns home wealthy after a year in the East India Company and becomes a politician. Other Galt novels included The Provost and The Entail.

In 1824 a Canada Company was formed with John Galt as secretary. In January 1825 Galt sailed for Canada with other commissioners of the Company, returning in June of that year. In October 1826 Galt again sailed to Canada for the Company as Superintendent of Upper Canada. In 1829 he was recalled to England.

In the northern autumn of 1818 Lady Blessington (1789-1849) opened her London salon at 11 St James’s Square. A visitor’s book shows that the salon was frequented by politicians, artists and writers, including Lambton’s father-in-law Earl Grey, Henry Brougham, Sir Thomas Lawrence, David Wilkie and the art teacher John Varley; as well as John Galt.

In 1825 Sir Thomas Lawrence painted and exhibited Master Lambton, a portrait of J. G. Lambton’s little son afterwards known as “The Red Boy.” Over time Lawrence had painted three generations of the Lambton family. That year, as we have seen, he also painted Alexander McLeay.

David Wilkie’s career followed somewhat in the footsteps of an earlier Scottish painter Allan Ramsay, whose second wife Margaret Lindsay had been a kinswoman of the Earl of Balcarres. Ramsay became painter in Ordinary to George III. David Wilkie was to paint George IV (in Highland dress), and William IV. He also painted Daniel O’Connell, the Irish ‘Liberator.’

In 1822 George IV visited Edinburgh, the first reigning monarch to visit Scotland in more than a century. To commemmorate the event Wilkie produced The King entering Holyrood Palace. Another of his historical pictures, The Chelsea pensioners reading The Waterloo Gazette, won great acclaim.

Towards the end of 1824 David Wilkie was again in Scotland and visited his native Fife. At Cupar the provost and other dignitaries invited him to a public dinner. On 2 October 1824 Wilkie wrote to his sister:

I dined the other day at the Presbytery dinner in Cupar, where I again met some of our oldest friends Dr Martin, Dr Barclay, Dr Adamson, Mr Gillespie… Dr Campbell.
And on 14 October 1824:

The house reminds me much of the old Crawford Lodge, but it is much larger…Our dinner at Cupar appeared to give great satisfaction to all present.
But distressing news awaited Wilkie. On his return to London late in 1824 he found his mother had died the day before. Two of his brothers died before the year was out. On 25 January 1825 news reached him of the death of his brother John in India the previous August, leaving a wife and six children. He had gone out to Bengal and spent 20 years in India in the service of the East India Company. His brother James came back from Canada in 1824 with ruined prospects and shattered health and died before the end of the year.

In July 1825, at the time the New Zealand Company were making preparations for the Rosanna voyage, David Wilkie, seized with symptoms of paralysis, left England with his cousin David Lister for a lengthy stay in Europe.

A further connection has emerged between David Wilkie and New Zealand. The London artist Frederick Wilkie, another relative of David Wilkie, had a daughter Caroline. In the 1850s Caroline Wilkie (1832?-1917) went out to Melbourne with her mother to marry the artist Nicholas Chevalier. In Melbourne the Chevaliers were friendly with the painter Georgiana McCrae, who had studied art in London with John Varley. In 1820 Georgiana’s future brother-in-law Alexander McCrae had visited New Zealand with the Navy.

In 1866 Caroline Chevalier left Melbourne to join her husband in New Zealand. She wrote a graphic account of their journey on horseback through the Otira Gorge to Hokitika. The couple were later in Madeira. It was Caroline who arranged the collection and preservation of her husband’s papers in the National Art Gallery of New Zealand.

Chapter 7.......

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