Decorative lunette painting, commissioned for the National Competition Gallery (now Rooms 100 and 101). D.W. Wynfield, Drawing from Still Life, 1868. Lunette 1 for Room 101, west wall (commencing from south end).

Dutch style interior with two figures in 17th century costume. Man seated on the right wearing a hat and drawing at an easel and woman standing on the left adding fruit to still life at table on the left. Dog sitting by her feet. Signed 'D.W. Wynfield' in bottom left corner.

Conserved with the support of The Pilgrim Trust, with additional thanks to The Worshipful Company of Grocers

Drawing from Still Life was commissioned in 1868 to decorate one of eighteen lunette-shaped recesses in the upper portion of rooms 100 and 101 (at that time the National Competition Gallery). The lunettes were removed just before the Second World War and placed in store. This painting, along with the eight others made for the west wall of room 101, was conserved and reinstalled in its original location in August 2010.

Historical significance: The National Competition Gallery (now rooms 100 and 101) in the East Ranges of the Museum was completed in 1864-65. At that time it was formed of two parallel top-lit rooms; these were used for the marking and display of work by art students in Department of Science and Art-run schools across the country. Richard Redgrave, who was placed in charge of the decoration of the gallery in 1863, proposed to commission paintings for the eighteen lunettes along the upper sections of the walls. The project, managed jointly by Redgrave and Henry Cole, continued for thirteen years; several lunettes were completed and in position by 1868, although work was not completed fully until 1876.

Broadly speaking, there were two stages in the production of the lunettes. Most of those created towards the beginning of the period were decorative, allegorical paintings carried out by art students from designs by Godfrey Sykes, Frank Moody, Alfred Morgan and Redgrave. A second stage was initiated in November of 1867 by William Frederick Yeames who contacted Cole and suggested that he should be commissioned for the project. Initial plans to commission other artists of the stature of Leighton, Watts and Poynter were scaled down, and the core of those chosen were historical genre painters from the loose association of artists known as the St John's Wood Clique: Yeames himself, G.D. Leslie, Henry Stacy Marks and D.W. Wynfield. Cole held a meeting with the artists to establish a theme for the lunettes, and, appropriately for a gallery in which students' work was displayed and judged, it was decided that the paintings should represent the practices of drawing, painting and sculpture in a programmatic representation of Redgrave's curriculum for art schools, the National Course of Art Instruction. The resulting subjects treated by the compositional canvases included life drawing, modelling from the life, study of anatomy, landscape painting, flower painting and still life drawing.

The various artistic activities represented in the paintings are set within relevant historical contexts; each takes place within the period and place considered to have fostered its inception or its apogee. So drawing the skeletal structure of the body is set in Renaissance Florence; still-life drawing is given a 17th-century Flemish setting; and landscape sketching takes place in 19th-century England.

One of the most powerful compositions of the group, Drawing from Still Life appears to represent the Flemish artist Frans Snyders (1579-1657) making a preparatory drawing on canvas for a still life painting. Seated on the right of the painting, he looks keenly over to the left where a maid arranges fruits and flowers on a table. Other objects on the table include a dead swan, the neck and wing of which dramatically hang down the side of the table, recalling Snyders' painting Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits and Vegetables in a Market(1614).

David Wilkie Wynfield (1837-1887), great nephew of David Wilkie, was a historical genre painter whose subjects were mainly taken from English history of the 16th and 17th centuries. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1859 to 1887, and was the founder of the St John's Wood Clique. He was also a pioneer photographer, and taught Julia Margaret Cameron. He died young of tuberculosis.

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