The Cottage Toilet
David Wilkie, 1824
The Cottage Toilette is an 1824 genre painting by the Scottish-born British artist David Wilkie, showing a young woman getting ready in the simple interior of a country cottage. The scene draws on The Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral play by the Scottish writer Allan Ramsay first published in 1725, and Wilkie moves the story into an everyday domestic setting, paying close attention to the light falling through the window and to the small objects on the dressing table. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1824 at Somerset House in London. It now belongs to the Wallace Collection in Marylebone. Its interest lies in how Wilkie turns a literary episode into an intimate portrait of rural life, with a calm composition and a handling of colour and fabric typical of his mature period.
- Painter
- David Wilkie
- Date
- 1824
- Medium
- oil paint
- Dimensions
- 30 × 38 cm
- Museum
- Wallace Collection, London
- Genre
- genre art
- Depicts
- woman
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