The Letter of Introduction

Sir David Wilkie · 1813 · oil on panel

The painting

The picture shows a small, intimate interior: a young man, evidently newly arrived from the country and elegantly but plainly dressed, stands before an elderly gentleman seated at a desk in a comfortable book-lined study. The young man holds out a sealed letter — the letter of introduction that secures the meeting — while the older man, half-turned in his chair, looks up at him with a slow, examining attention. A small terrier sniffs at the young man's boot.

The scene is loaded with quiet social meaning. The letter of introduction was a defining social instrument of the Georgian and Regency periods: a written endorsement carried by hand from one gentleman to another, securing access to people and places one could not otherwise enter. Wilkie's picture is partly autobiographical — he had himself arrived in London in 1805 carrying letters of introduction from his patrons in Scotland — and it touches the slightly humiliating moment when the worth of those letters is being weighed.

About Wilkie

David Wilkie was born in 1785 in Cults, Fife, the son of a parish minister. He trained at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh and moved to London in 1805 at the age of nineteen, where his first exhibited work at the Royal Academy, The Village Politicians (1806), made his reputation almost overnight. He was elected ARA in 1809 and RA in 1811 — at twenty-six, one of the youngest Academicians in the Society's history. The 1810s, during which The Letter of Introduction was painted, were his most productive decade.

Wilkie's early style fused the small-scale genre painting of the Dutch and Flemish seventeenth century — Adriaen van Ostade, Jan Steen, David Teniers — with a distinctly Scottish observation of rural and domestic life. He was extraordinarily admired in his lifetime; Sir Walter Scott called him "the modern Teniers," and George IV, while still Prince Regent, was an important patron. He was made Painter-in-Ordinary to the King in 1830 and knighted in 1836.

The Dutch tradition

The picture's most direct reference is to the small genre interiors of the Dutch seventeenth century — the Ostade brothers, Gerard Dou, Pieter de Hooch — paintings that Wilkie studied closely both in the British royal collections and on his 1814 trip to Paris, where Napoleon's looted continental masters were still on display at the Louvre. The wood panel support, the small scale, the warm brown-toned ground, the careful modulation of interior light through a single window: all are Dutch in derivation.

What is Wilkie's own is the social specificity. Where the Dutch genre painters worked with anonymous types — the village dunce, the tavern flirt — Wilkie observes a particular, almost novelistic moment of contemporary British social life. The young man's stiffness, the older gentleman's slight grace in the face of an interruption, the small dog finishing the composition: each is observed from the inside of the same society that bought the painting.

Technique

Wilkie's method in the 1810s was extraordinarily painstaking. Pictures were begun with a careful underdrawing on a warm ground (often a pinkish-grey or umber wash on mahogany panel), then built up in transparent glazes following the Dutch model. He was famously slow — The Letter of Introduction reportedly occupied him over many months between 1812 and 1813 — and the finished surface has the deep, glowing quality that close adherence to the Dutch glazing technique produces.

The handling of light is particularly skilled. A single source — the window at the left, unseen — falls across the young visitor's coat and the older man's hand, articulating the figures in a precise tonal hierarchy. The intervening air is full of small accents: the gold of a clock case, the spine of a leather-bound book, the shine on the dog's coat. None is allowed to compete with the silent transaction between the two men.

Reception and provenance

The picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1814 and was immediately recognised as one of Wilkie's masterpieces. It was bought by the Earl of Mansfield and remained in the family collection at Scone Palace through the nineteenth century. It now hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, where it is one of the centerpieces of the British painting holdings.

Further reading

• H. A. D. Miles, Sir David Wilkie of Scotland (1785–1841) (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1987)
• Nicholas Tromans, David Wilkie: The People's Painter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007)
• National Gallery of Scotland catalogue entry