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This chapter is concerned with David Wilkie and Scotland, reflecting back upon the artist's whole career, first considering the question of how Scotland was to be represented in pictures. It reviews Wilkie's Sir David Baird Discovering the Body of Sultan Tippoo Saib. Furthermore, Wilkie's relation with the emerging art institutions of Edinburgh are investigated, and this story is related to the larger question of how the issue of patronage helped define Scottish culture's view of itself in the nineteenth century. The chapter then illustrates how, in his last completed major work, Wilkie explicitly placed the iconic Highlander in his imperial context. Wilkie's picture of Scottish soldiers in India forms part of the museological history of Empire. Wilkie was pressed back into the model of Scottish art that imagined the nation's cultural life to have grown from the grassroots upwards, encouraged by ‘a healthy, philistine demand’ and independent of elite patronage.

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.

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.

This chapter is concerned with David Wilkie's representation of the human body, face and mind, and also addresses the expressions in Wilkie's pictures, which were often considered the bedrock of his realism. For Wilkie, the role of vision in social life was what was at stake, and this led him to more sophisticated interpretations of the mind–body problem than conventional art theory allowed. It is noted that, as a very young artist in Edinburgh, Wilkie had explored what expression might be, painting contorted faces which did not necessarily express any sustained passion, and basing a key work on the blush, the quintessential non-muscular facial expression. The chapter then explores some of the common features of Village Holiday, Wardrobe Ransacked, Blind-Man's Buff, Rabbit on the Wall: a candle-light amusement and the Penny Wedding.

This chapter discusses directly David Wilkie's relationship with his audiences and with the institutions which mediated that relationship. Wilkie explored the possibilities of retaining more intimate, private relationships with artworks: in domestic spaces, and in the ancient buildings that had sheltered artistic treasures for centuries. He sought to instill respect for painterly tradition into the institution, and especially into its students. Moreover, the chapter explores two contexts for viewing that seemed to offer such real alternatives: on one hand the private, domestic space; and on the other, the picturesque location – the Old Master encountered in its original, ecclesiastical setting. Wilkie's respect for the Roman Church was reflected in a series of four paintings of pilgrim subjects, the first of which he completed in Italy as he recovered his strength.

The picturesque, in its basic sense of a vision of reality guided through the optic of the classic painters of the past, was a constant characteristic of David Wilkie's imagery. In the Scottish Enlightenment's models of visual culture, the direct experience of the objects of vision was equated as much with feeling as with dispassionate analysis. The realism that Wilkie was seen to have achieved with his first pictures evaporated after about 1815, and the exhaustion just referred to was signalled by the more intrusive semantic structures that Wilkie imported into his genre scenes in the post-war years. Dark, rich, Baroque colouring, along with nostalgic visions of an earthily decent Scottishness, became the hallmarks of the ‘fine old Scotch school’ to which Walter Sickert paid tribute in 1910 upon its passing into history with the death of W. Q. Orchardson.

This chapter argues that the change in attitude to art from Reformation times to today was undergirded by theological argument: first among Enlightenment philosophers such as Alison, Hutcheson, Reid, Turnbull, and Stewart; then by the more practically orientated reflections of artists such as Sir David Wilkie. The aim of art should be more than simply representational: it should elicit some sense of the divine, a view endorsed by the most important Scottish theologian to discuss the issue, P. T. Forsyth. Two of the most interesting artists in this respect are identified as Robert Scott Lauder and William Dyce. The discussion ends with an exploration of the possibilities for creative engagement today, particularly with apparently hostile initiatives.