Sir David Wilkie RA (1785-1841) The Dreamer Pencil and watercolour on paper, 12.7 x 17.

Sir David Wilkie RA (1785-1841) The Dreamer Pencil and watercolour on paper, 12.7 x 17.8 cm (6 x 6¾") Titled in pencil, dated ‘Dublin, August 12th 1835Provenance: Colnaghi’s, London; Private collection, Channel IslandsAt the height of his immense fame as one of the most famous British artists of the nineteenth century, David Wilkie visited Ireland in the late summer of 1835 and The Dreamer is one of a series of drawings he executed in Dublin as part of a proposed visual exploration of Irish history and culture, As his early biographer records: it was suggested to Wilkie that ‘Irish history, domestic as well as national, had failed to attract the pencils of the recording brethren of the easel’.At this date, he continued, ‘Maclise had scarcely begun to embody the creations with which he has since illustrated Ireland’. And so ‘with a picture or two of a national kind in his head, the painter departed for Ireland and reached Dublin about the middle of August where he made sketches from scenes and characters such as he reckoned would unite well into a picture.’The first of these pencil sketches done from Dublin street characters and other notable personages, as recorded in the Life of the Artist of 1843, was the present work 1) The Dreamer. Others in the sequence included 2) The Holy Water; 4) The Nun’s Darling; 8) The Carmelite. (Allan Cunningham, The Life of Sir David Wilkie….3 Vols, London, 1843, Vol. 3, p. 99). Wilkie’s trip to Ireland can be followed through a sequence of dated drawings. The day after he drew The Dreamer, for example, on 13 August, he drew an Irish Baptism (British Museum, 1885,0711.29700); clearly the overt religiosity of the populace fascinated this son of the manse. However, Wilkie’s work outside the capital ultimately proved more fruitful than these Dublin drawings.Of the sketches made ‘in various parts of the island’ The Smuggling Still at Work and the Peep-o’-Day Boy were translated into major oils (National Gallery, Edinburgh, 1840; Tate, 1835–6, exhibited 1836). But the freshness of observed reality on display here, as Wilkie sketches a sleeping – and dreaming – book vendor, makes for a hugely appealing and very rare Irish work by this great Scottish artist. Important Irish Art | 6 December 2023