NEW HAVEN, CT.-This fall, the Yale Center for British Art presents an extraordinary exhibition tracing the brilliant and tumultuous career of late-eighteenth-century painter Francis Wheatley. The Worlds of Francis Wheatley (August 31–December 31, 2005), is the first U.S. exhibition of Wheatley’s work and features 59 pieces drawn from the Center’s rich collection of paintings, prints, and rare books. In addition to Wheatley’s oil paintings and evocative and delicate watercolors, this novel exhibition will also include reproductive prints after Wheatley’s paintings. The Worlds of Francis Wheatley will explore not only Wheatley’s career, but also the status of paintings and prints in the eighteenth century.

Francis Wheatley (1747–1801) inhabited myriad artistic and social worlds during his career: Georgian London and rural Ireland, the high life of his wealthy clients and the marginal world of the theater, the Royal Academy and the print shop. His artistic output was equally broad, encompassing printmaking, portraiture, genre painting, and history painting. Wheatley excelled in each of these areas, despite great personal and financial difficulties. Contemporary commentary reveals that he was a mercurial individual: probably a gambler and certainly a dandy. In 1779 after being elected to the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts, Wheatley fled London with another man’s wife, living in Dublin for several years in a sham marriage. An acquaintance noted that, after becoming addicted to the high life of Georgian London, Wheatley found it difficult to “live in accordance with his means.”

Wheatley is best known to visitors to the Center for his group portraits, or “conversation pieces,” particularly the masterful The Oliver and Ward Families and The Browne Family. The first section of the exhibition explores these important works, looking in particular at how Wheatley responded to his clients’ desires by portraying middle-class merchants and bankers in the trappings of country gentlemen. Wheatley’s career in Ireland makes up the second part of the exhibition. During this period of artistic freedom, Wheatley moved beyond studio portraiture to create some of his most important works. Sketching and painting watercolors out-of-doors, Wheatley focused his attention on the peasants and rural poor living outside of Dublin, and in the process gathered material that would serve him for the rest of his career. Returning to London in 1783, Wheatley immersed himself in the late Georgian art world. He began to create paintings for the reproductive print market and consequently expanded his subject matter to include contemporary events and historical and literary scenes. The peasant figures from Wheatley’s Irish sketches were reformulated to serve the artist’s burgeoning career as a painter of sentimental rustic genre scenes. Wheatley’s depictions of peasant life were tinged with morality and eroticism in equal measure, and they were immensely popular with the print-buying public. His greatest success in the print market was his series The Cries of London, and the exhibition ends with a comprehensive display of these works.

Part of an ongoing initiative to showcase the holdings of an individual artist’s work in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, this exhibition is organized to compliment Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s “Cottage Door,” which will feature Wheatley paintings from private collections. The Worlds of Francis Wheatley has been organized by Angus Trumble, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, and Cassandra Albinson, Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art.