The Village Recruit

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The Village Recruit
The Village Recruit.png
Artist David Wilkie
Year1805
Type Oil on canvas, genre painting
Dimensions64.1 cm× 76.8 cm(25.2 in× 30.2 in)
Location Private Collection

The Village Recruit is an 1805 genre painting by the Scottish artist David Wilkie. [1] [2] Painted at the time of the Napoleonic Wars it shows a recruiting party of the British Army in a country tavern where one young man has just enlisted and prepares to spend his King's shilling on further alcohol. [3] It was painted when Wilkie was around twenty, the year he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy. It was one of three paintings that were spin-offs from his 1804 work Pitlessie Fair , which had featured a recruiting party. [4] Influenced like much of Wilkie's work by the old masters of the seventeenth century, it has strong similarities to his better-known work The Village Politicians. [5] It was initially known by the alternative title Bounty Money. [6]

Contents

The work was not publicly exhibited in Willkie's lifetime. In the 1830s it was engraved as a print. [7] A version of the painting is in the collection of the Fusilier Museum in Bury, Greater Manchester. [8]

See also

References

  1. Tromans p.40
  2. Hichberger p.123
  3. Tromans p.39
  4. Tromans p.4
  5. Tromans p.39-41
  6. Bayne p.34
  7. Tromans p.101
  8. https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-village-recruit-162311

Bibliography