The Village Recruit
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| The Village Recruit | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | David Wilkie |
| Year | 1805 |
| Type | Oil on canvas, genre painting |
| Dimensions | 64.1 cm × 76.8 cm (25.2 in × 30.2 in) |
| Location | Private Collection |
The Village Recruit is an 1805 genre painting by the Scottish artist David Wilkie.[1][2] Painted at the time of the Napoleonic Wars it shows a recruiting party of the British Army in a country tavern where one young man has just enlisted and prepares to spend his King's shilling on further alcohol.[3] It was painted when Wilkie was around twenty, the year he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy. It was one of three paintings that were spin-offs from his 1804 work Pitlessie Fair, which had featured a recruiting party.[4] Influenced like much of Wilkie's work by the old masters of the seventeenth century, it has strong similarities to his better-known work The Village Politicians.[5] It was initially known by the alternative title Bounty Money.[6]
The work was not publicly exhibited in Willkie's lifetime. In the 1830s it was engraved as a print.[7] A version of the painting is in the collection of the Fusilier Museum in Bury, Greater Manchester.[8]