Fife-born Wilkie's glittering early career was launched spectacularly on the back of a single painting, Village Politicians, following its exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 1806. Wilkie had caught the public's insatiable mood for genre painting and for the next 15 years or so, he produced a variety of exceptional and influential Scottish genre scenes, many of which were widely collected as prints. In the early 1820s, he grew tired of the subject and turned his attention to historical paintings. However, his work from this later period proved to be less of a critical and commercial success and he never regained his early popularity.