History and human experience in the art of David Wilkie, 1806--1835 (Scotland).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation explores the relationship between written and painted history in early nineteenth-century Britain as it was carefully negotiated in the work of Scottish-born artist David Wilkie. In eighteenth-century Britain, historical writing was closely allied with the discipline of rhetoric, designed to persuade its young aristocratic audience to model themselves on the great heroes it described. By the 1824s, however, history had come to be more concerned with social aspects of everyday life that contribute to a broader understanding of a culture and its institutions than with the deeds of heroes and statesmen. This period's re-evaluation of the relationship between individuals and the past also forced a change in written history's visual counterpart, whose sophisticated references to past art geared toward an elite audience had now become obsolete.
The major thesis of this dissertation is that the visual language required by new forms of written history evolved out of the work of genre painters, and that it was Wilkie, mainly known as a genre painter, who first successfully used it to express the elevated themes of history painting. I suggest that genre painters, with their focus on everyday life, were better equipped to express the new history than artists working within the stylistic confines of traditional history painting. Through an analysis of three of Wilkie's paintings, contemporary accounts of their reception, and comparisons between his works and those of two of his contemporaries, Benjamin Robert Haydon and Richard Parkes Bonington, I consider how artists struggled to adapt to changing views of history in this period. This study also places Wilkie's art within the contemporary political context in which it was made, when war with France, economic depression, widespread agitation for political reform, and the rise to power of the middle class, challenged Britons' notions of what history meant, and to whom it spoke. A conservative artist with elite patrons, Wilkie found his hybrid works particularly vulnerable to shifting interpretations centered on the struggle between individual enfranchisement and the rights of the established order.