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This chapter considers the peculiarly visual characteristics of David Wilkie's version of history. It also discusses Wilkie's journey to Turkey and Palestine in 1840–1, undertaken in the hope of serving that cause. Between the commissioning and the exhibition of the Chelsea Pensioners, Wilkie reinvented himself as a Scottish artist. The success of Knox Preaching in 1832 encouraged him to revisit some of the ambitious historical subjects that he had kept on stand-by since his years abroad in 1825–8. At the end of his life, Wilkie was confirmed in what his own work as an historical painter had suggested: that the artist's version of history – even divine history – had its own language and its own authority, which neither books nor even experience necessarily had the capacity to reform.

Chelsea Hospital was lauded by its contemporaries as the honest rewards of service for the lower class soldier and this view of the Pensioners had considerable cultural capital, with a very similar image being presented in various forms of print culture, from the cheapest ballads to the more expensive essay literature. To some extent, this hagiographic attitude towards the Pensioners has remained in the existing historiography of the institution. However, implicit within the praise for these men was concern about the risk of maintaining those who did not fulfil this ideal. This concern was part of the much wider anxieties about the prevalence of fraud amongst the younger able-bodied parish poor. At Chelsea, many of these individuals were young and some presented themselves to the Hospital without visibly extreme disability. Their narratives were not known by their communities, and not known by those at the Board. This chapter looks at some of the lengths Chelsea went to when dealing with those with both obvious disabilities, and with those that were considered more ambiguous and therefore potentially fraudulent.

This chapter argues that David Wilkie sought to represent the everyday stories as the authentic basis of social life, and also shows that his initial image of the everyday was not sustainable once there was no longer any consensus over who was and who was not properly part of society. Pitlessie Fair and the Village Politicians were visceral scenes of rough country life. William Hogarth is conspicuous by his absence from his historical scheme of things; and, given the regularity with which Wilkie was blithely compared to Hogarth by his contemporaries, he can only have had mixed feelings about him. The Chelsea Pensioners was one of three outdoor urban scenes that Wilkie exhibited in succession in 1821–3. The Village Politicians had as its basic theme the disruptive effects of news upon everyday life: the two were represented as incompatible.