As usual with Wilkie’s pictures,
The Village Holiday was developed over many months, with interruptions and alterations, but this motif, a woman trying to drag her drunken husband away from his friends, was becoming clear from mid October 1809. In his painted
Harvest Home Turner included only a faint echo of it in a group of men to right of centre, but here the connection with Wilkie is clear and cannot be coincidental. The woman on the right wearing a cap and holding a small child, and the smock worn by the central figure, her husband, are particularly close to Wilkie’s original (Wilkie’s model for the woman had been Charlotte Fletcher, sister-in-law of the portrait painter John Jackson, while the drunken man was studied from an ‘old man, Morely’).
2 Turner is not recorded as having visited Wilkie’s studio while the artist was at work on
The Village Holiday and had almost certainly abandoned work on his harvest picture by 1812. However, his presumed patron the Earl of Essex visited Wilkie twice, on 1 December 1809 and 2 February 1810, when he saw
The Village Holiday and expressed interest in it,
3 and perhaps he described this group to Turner or even made a surreptitious sketch of it. Also John Fuller, Turner’s patron from later that year, was the ‘person of very rough manners’ whose anonymous visit surprised Wilkie on 29 April.
4 See entry to
D08216 for further discussion.
