Oil painting entitled 'Landscape: Gipsies with Two Donkeys and a Dog' by Sir David Wilkie. Great Britain, ca. early 19th century.

Oil on panel depicting a landscape sketch with three Roma seated around a fire, accompanied by two donkeys and a dog

Given by John Sheepshanks, 1857

Given by John Sheepshanks, 1857

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.

This sketch small sketch is on panel, but it is neither signed nor dated. There is another version of this sketch, also on panel, without date or signature, which was catalogue no. 65b in the 1958 Royal Academy exhibition Sir David Wilkie R.A.. A note on the Departmental file comments that it "is practically a replica". At the time it belonged to Roy Thomson Esq. This other version was sold at Christie's 28 October 1999, lot 81 (The Scottish Sale, 6237, London, King Street). Its provenance was "Probably Sir William Knighton (d.1836), and sold in 1848"; Knighton was one of Wilkie's patrons.

Wilkie's major compositions usually required a huge amount of labour to prepare, involving many preparatory drawings and oil sketches. At the start of the process Wilkie made many rapid, slight drawings in pen and ink. These he then worked up into greater detail. Famously he then arranged small lay-figures in a box representing the interior so as to make experimental oil sketches of the grouping and the lighting. Finally, before embarking on the finished painting he would make a highly finished oil sketch. Wilkie's oil sketches were much sought after by collectors, especially the highly finished ones. In fact it was not unknown for Wilkie himself to make copies of his own oil sketches for finished compositions. In 1807 he was asked by the Earl of Mulgrave to sell as many of such sketches as he might make which the Earl intended to use to decorate a room at Mulgrave Castle [near Whitby]. According to Nicholas Tromans in David Wilkie: Painter of everyday life (Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2002), catalogue number 29, p.108) Wilkie was therefore encouraged "to make for Mulgrave further sketches of his pictures after their completion - in effect miniature replica versions... several of these were made before Wilkie's relationship with Mulgrave quietly died away a few years afterwards; they were included in Mulgrave's 1832 sale, where they were not distinguished from the genuinely preparatory oil sketches: telling them apart remains a problem". In 1830 Wilkie also produced for Sir William Knighton, a valued patron, a "sketch", signed and dated 1830, of a long finished work, by that date already in the Royal Collection ('The Penny Wedding', 1818, HMQ).

As noted by Tromans, Wilkie himself produced variants or indeed replicas of his own sketches, and although this seems to have applied mainly to the final compositional sketches he made for his major finished paintings, it seems also to have been true of slighter oil sketches (it has not been possible to associate with any of Wilkie's finished paintings). It is not known exactly when Knighton and Sheepshanks acquired their versions of this sketch, but according to Christie's Knighton owned his prior to its sale in 1848 and Sheepshanks owned his prior to his gift to the V&A in 1857. It is not possible to suggest which might be considered the "primary" version, but both are likely to be by Wilkie.

As noted in the catalogue entry for the variant sold Christie's 1999, "Sir Professor Hamish Miles has kindly suggested that this work may date from circa 1815-23". This can also be considered the date range of the V&A sketch.

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 .

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