Both throughout his life and since, Sir David Wilkie has occupied an ambivalent, and occasionally paradoxical, position within the canon of British and European late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century painting. The span of his career alone prevents easy categorization, falling as it does neatly between the polemics of Reynolds and the aesthetics of Ruskin. He was a Scottish painter who forged a career in England and asserted a very British vision, yet art historically his...