The Recruiting Party

The Recruiting Party
Artist	Edward Villiers Rippingille
Year	1822
Type	Oil on mahogany, genre painting
Dimensions	83.4 cm× 135.9 cm(32.8 in× 53.5 in)
Location	City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol

The Recruiting Party is an 1822 genre painting by the English artist Edward Villiers Rippingille. It portrays a British Army recruiting party outside on an English village green outside an inn. Although the scene appears to be a merry one, it conveys a warning about the underhand practices of recruiting sergeants who would trick drunken young men into taking the King's shilling. ^[1]

It was shown at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1822 at Somerset House in London, one of a number of genre paintings to attract interest along with David Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch . ^[2] One reviewer claims it featured "the best representations of English peasantry" we ever saw. ^[3] Today it is in the collection of the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, having been acquired in 1917. ^[4]

See also

• The Village Recruit , an 1805 painting by David Wilkie

References

1. Hichberger p 122-23
2. "1822 The Triumph of the Everyday". chronicle250.com. Retrieved 2025-03-09.
3. Solkin p.210
4. "The Recruiting Party | Art UK".

Bibliography

• Hichberger J.W.M. Images of the Army: The Military in British Art, 1815-1914. Manchester University Press, 2017.
• Solkin, David H. Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-century Britain. Yale University Press, 2009.