- Title:
- Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch
- Object name(s):
- Picture; British
- Brief description:
- This acknowledged masterpiece represents Wilkie at the height of his powers. Melding seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish influences with the contemporary demand for genre scenes, the artist created an artwork that celebrated the victory of the Battle of Waterloo (1815), while redefining what constituted ‘history painting’. Chelsea Pensioners caused a sensation at the Royal Academy in 1822 and confirmed the artist’s preeminent position in the British Art world. The National Gallery was founded two years later with the acquisition of 38 paintings from the estate of John Julius Angerstein, among which were works by William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, and The Village Holiday by Wilkie. From the beginning, British art and Wilkie, then a contemporary living artist, was central to the Gallery’s collection.Chelsea Pensioners neatly encapsulates how the emerging National Gallery was a direct outcome of British wartime and post-war pride and patriotism. It was during the Napoleonic War period that London overtook Paris and Amsterdam as the centre of the old master market and critical and popular opinion moved decidedly towards the idea that British art could now hold its own with the long-established European schools, including that of France.
- Collection:
- National Gallery
- Credit line:
- The Wellington Collection, Apsley House
- Current location:
- Room 34
- Inscription content:
- Signed; Dated
- Material:
- Oil on panel
- Object name:
- Picture; British
- Object production date:
- 1822
- Date - earliest / single:
- 1822
- Date - latest:
- 1822
- Object production date:
- Date - period:
- 1800-24
- Object production person:
- Sir David Wilkie
- Person's birth date:
- 1785
- Person's death date:
- 1841
- Object production place:
- Britain
- Other number:
- L1371
- Other number type:
- object number
- Other number:
- 0CWX-000B-0000-0000
- Other number type:
- PID
- Other number:
- L1371
- Other number type:
- display number
- Other number:
- l31371
- Other number type:
- sort number
- Responsible department/section:
- Main Collection
- Right note:
- To encourage the use and reuse of the National Gallery's collection data, they are released under the following dedications and licences: Structured data (as opposed to narrative texts) are released under a Creative Commons Zero dedication (CC0): https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/. Descriptions, notes and all other narrative text content are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 licence (CC BY-NC-ND): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
- Style:
- Regency
Persistent shareable link for this record: https://museumdata.uk/objects/69533967-7bf5-319e-a987-21ecf67da2e5
Use licence for this record: CC BY
Attribution for this record: https://museumdata.uk/objects/69533967-7bf5-319e-a987-21ecf67da2e5, National Gallery, CC BY
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