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Sir David Wilkie, R.A.
Scottish (1785-1841) |
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Click Image to Enlarge
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Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
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| Portrait of the Artist's Sister, Mrs. Helen Hunter, 1833 Watercolor over black chalk 47.7 x 34.9 cm WA 1954.82 |
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In a span of less than two years, Wilkie experiences a number of great family tragedies. His mother, his brother James, and his sister Helen’s fiancé die in 1824, and soon after in 1825, his brother John dies in India. Wilkie’s health breaks down and he then begins three years of recuperation and travel in Europe. He returns in 1829 showcasing some of his Italian and Spanish works which aids in reestablishing and reintroducing his reputation and work to the public.
Around the years in which this portrait is executed, Wilkie was commissioned to do many portraits, most notably including royal portraits. Wilkie’s portrait of William IV was exhibited in 1832, and was received most favorably by the public. After this success, Wilkie painted more royal portraits in the subsequent years. His sister’s portrait, dated to 1833, is situated within the beginning of his portraiture production. The technique in this drawing brings to mind a drawing he did of the Earl of Morton which is similarly rendered in a bold hatching in black chalk, but here subdued by applications of wash, showing that he is more aware of tonal values.
There is substantial evidence of Wilkie’s working method which entailed obsessive elaborate preparations for pictures, sometimes drawn out over a period of years. But here, the presumed sentimentality of choosing the subject of his sister probably fell into a category of drawings done for pleasure because of its deviation from his incredibly busy commissions during these years. His sister was the subject of many of his drawings. He was very devoted to his sister who kept house for him in London. This drawing, one of the most elaborate, large scale chalk drawings, and exceptionally highly finished. The nobility in this drawing, elaboration which suggests that they were perhaps intended to be finished works rather than preparatory studies, but this drawing in particular seems quite finished.
The precision of line work in the face and the hair is markedly and painstakingly worked out, it is highly likely that this was a finished drawing in and of itself, and not a preparatory for an oil painting. In addition, if one compares this drawing to other drawings which were made in connection with pictures, there is a significant difference, even with the more finished studies.
According to a few sources, Wilkie’s drawings were rarely more than functional, ideas cast on paper to refine or discard later, or studies- ranging from the slightest to the most elaborate- for paintings projected or in progress. He worked very slowly throughout much of his career, and so perhaps drawings can be seen as conscious attempts to keep his mind active. There is significant evidence that drawings specifically connected with his own pictures. Wilkie’s method entailed first trying out an idea for a composition through numerous sketches, then to focus on certain details for which he would make independent studies on a rather larger scale and with somewhat more finish, and finally to combine these into a more carefully worked out arrangement.
There has been recent scholarship that delved into the life history of Wilkie, revealing that Wilkie was clearly “deeply neurotic”. He had a family history of psychiatric illness and he himself suffered multiple episodes of attacks, and the culminating breakdown in 1825 required a major timeout. It is not until 1831-1832 that Wilkie is noted to have fully come back from the old, shaken, cold, and nervousness of his ill state. Given the extreme circumstances of the fragility of his health, and given his tragic family history of deaths, there exists the possibility of his drawings of his sister as more than pleasure drawings or exercises for his more treasured portraits. The fragility of life that Wilkie most surely must have been conscious of and struggling with seems to be an issue with which the sentimentality and the robustness of the portrait of his sister comes to confront.
Looking back to a portrait Wilkie painted of his parents, there is a direct correlation between the compositional placement of the figures in his portrait, and that of an elderly couple in Dutch and Flemish engravings. His parents’ portrait was revisited again seven years later in a copy that Wilkie sent to his brother in India. The second portrait was done shortly after the death of his father, and although Wilkie copied the previous painting, he changed the demeanor of his mother’s appearance into one that was much softer, less severe in piety, and a greater and closer focus on the faces.
Perhaps the nature in which Wilkie’s portrait of his sister was conceived can be fit into a set of similar circumstances. Perhaps a connection can be made between the great influence of Dutch prints on Wilkie’s work, and in the context of his sister’s portrait, just like that of his parents, perhaps Wilkie was looking at memento mori Dutch engravings as a reference for such a portrait of his sister. Representations of memento mori, such as in Bol’s Hour of Death, and other moralizing warnings about vices often represented the upper classes as culprits. It is suggested that the wealthy and elegantly dressed were subject to lustful passion. And thus the warning of the inevitability of mortality. The luxuriousness of Helen’s satiny dress, fur stole, cape, and elaborate updo, She is thus depicted in such fashion at its most up-to-date of the 1830's. Hair in a mass of heavy curls on each side and parted was typical of formal hair coiffure in 1833.[i] Evening dresses were cut very low and off the shoulders as Wilkie’s sister’s dress is shown here, materialized in heavy silks of fashionable colors such as rose. Outdoor garments such as mantles were exuberant with sleeves falling over the hand, accompanied by a fur collar and cape.[ii] There is a juxtaposition of the delicateness and care taken to render the face and the increasing looseness of detail in the rest of the body and the denotation of textures. Her gaze is of conscious awareness, very similar to the sort of gaze with which Wilkie painted his mother, she is very poised but not haughty. Her gaze is at odds with her body language. She clutches her fur stole which is at odds with the whiteness of her exposed skin. She wears a ring, although this picture is definitely painted after the death of her fiancé. Taking into perspective the context of Wilkie’s life circumstances, there is a definite sense that Wilkie is wanting to capture the essence of his sister and to preserve it.