Oil painting entitled 'The Broken Jar' by Sir David Wilkie. Great Britain, 1816.

Oil on panel depicting a man seated in bed with a broken vase in pieces on the floor beside him. Three male figures are crowded in shock in the doorway of the bedroom, holding up candles to illuminate the scene.

Given by John Sheepshanks, 1857

Given by John Sheepshanks, 1857. Exhibited at the RA in 1816.

Extract from Parkinson, Ronald, Catalogue of British Oil Paintings 1820-1860. Victoria & Albert Museum, HMSO, London, 1990. p.xviii.

John Sheepshanks (1784-1863) was the son of a wealthy cloth manufacturer. He entered the family business, but his early enthusiasms were for gardening and the collecting of Dutch and Flemish prints. He retired from business at the age of 40, by which time he had begun collecting predominantly in the field of modern British art. He told Richard Redgrave RA, then a curator in the South Kensington Museum (later the V&A) of his intention to give his collection to the nation. The gallery built to house the collection was the first permanent structure on the V&A site, and all concerned saw the Sheepshanks Gift as forming the nucleus of a National Gallery of British Art. Sheepshanks commissioned works from contemporary artists, bought from the annual RA summer exhibitions, but also bought paintings by artists working before Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837. The Sheepshanks Gift is the bedrock of the V&A's collection of British oil paintings, and served to encourage many other collectors to make donations and bequests.

Historical significance: Sir David Wilkie R.A. (November 1785-1841) was born at Cults, which is about twenty miles north of Edinburgh. His father was the minister there and his maternal grandfather owned the mill at Pitlessie. His formal artistic training began when he was fifteen and his family sent him to the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh; this was the earliest publicly funded art school in Britain. He moved to London in 1805, and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1806 at the age of only twenty. His painting "The Village Politicians" was a sensation and he was immediately something of a celebrity. He went on to become internationally recognised, his paintings of everyday life, with strong narrative themes, peopled with expressive characters and packed with eye-catching details, hugely popular with the public. He was made a full member of the Royal Academy in 1811, was appointed Painter to the King in 1830 and was knighted in 1836.

Tromans, Nicholas. David Wilkie: painter of everyday life. exh.cat. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2002, p.74, cat. no. 14.

The following is the full text of the entry:

"14.The Broken China Jar
Victoria and Albert Museum
oil on panel, 20.1 x 16.6 cm

Commissioned by Peter Coxe in 1813 to be engraved for his The Social Day (1823); shown at the RA in 1816

The full title of this independent little oil sketch in the 1816 Royal Academy catalogue was The broken china jar; or ghost laid: a story founded on fact, and painted to illustrate a book entitled "The Social Day." This was a sumptuous vanity publication eventually brought out by the retired auctioneer Peter Coxe in 1823 after years of difficulties with unreliable or dishonest associates, among them Charles Warren, the engraver of Wilkie's picture, whose plate 'was nearly five years in the hands of the artist [i.e. Warren], who had undertaken it should be competed within twelve months' (Coxe [1823], x).
The story of 'The Ghost Laid' tells of a backfiring prank played upon a travelling English sailor by the inhabitants of a Scottish castle who offer him hospitality at Christmas. The laird, depicted as a vulgar comedian, sets up the practical joke: he and his friends tie strings to the furniture in their guest's room, intending to rattle the things about to convince him the castle is haunted. Spotting the plan, the 'gallant tar' reattaches one of the strings to an expensive vase; when it smashes the Scots themselves rush off in terror of a spook, cowardly sending servants to investigate, led by the butler:

... who'd been part undress'd
To lay his weary limbs at rest,
Snatched from a chair, as down he run,
And drew his master's surtout on,
And seemed, in this his borrowed vest,
At first, as if a parlour guest.

Wilkie has shown the vase in pieces having fallen from a dish on top of a cabinet; the string is just visible. The concluding moral of Coxe's story is that 'The strongest minds, replete with sense,/Like not the laugh at their expense.'
It is interesting that at this point in his career Wilkie was not considered an inappropriate choice for an artist to illustrate a story mocking Scottish baronial romanticism. His talent for representing different kinds of humour was clearly considered the most important thing by Coxe, but even Wilkie's narrative powers were insufficient to give viewers of the picture at the 1816 RA exhibition (as opposed to the engraving in the book) much of an idea of what was going on in it.
The chair shown here, and perhaps the jar, are the same as appear in the Letter of Introduction (no. 12), both being among Wilkie's own possessions: the chair appears again in Andrew Geddes' 1816 portrait of the artist (frontispiece). Perhaps the broken china which is the topic of this story suggested to Wilkie the subject of China-Menders which he showed at the BI in 1819 (unlocated; repr. Bayne [1903], opp. 112)."

Troman's notes under cat. no. 4, "The Blind Fiddler" (Tate Gallery), which is also on panel and dates from 1806, that this "was the first major work of Wilkie's to be painted on a wooden panel rather than canvas, one of the most far-reaching technical means by which he sought to emulate Netherlandish art after his move to London (several eighteenth-century French painters had also regularly used panel, such as Greuze and Vigée-Lebrun)." The "Broken Jar" was painted a decade later, and Wilkie continued to use panel as well as canvas throughout his career.

This is one of eight works attributed to David Wilkie (1785-1841) which were given to the Victoria & Albert Museum by to the collector John Sheepshanks (1784-1863) in 1857, only 16 years after Wilkie's death. But although Sheepshanks and Wilkie were contemporaries and Sheepshanks knew personally many of the artists whose work he owned, it seems likely that the works attributed to Wilkie in Sheepshanks' collection were not purchased directly from the artist .

Sir David Wilkie exhibited this small genre scene at the Royal Academy in 1816. Such pictures held enormous popular and commercial appeal and were collected in great numbers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, genre scenes made up an important part of the gift of some 500 pictures given to the Museum by John Sheepshanks in 1857 as the basis of a national collection of British painting.

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