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In England. 633 present day. Three small landscapes are the only works by Nasmyth in the national galleries of London, but they are good examples of his peculiar excellences, which may be summed up as truthful detail, forcible effect, and modest but harmonious colouring, rather inclined to be heavy and dark. He rarely ventured on a large or com- plicated composition. At the head of the genre painters of England stands Sir David Wilkie (1785 — 1841), a Scotchman, with whose vivid renderings of homely Scotch life we are all familiar ; but Edward Bird (1772— 1819)— well represented in the National Gallery by his Baffle for the Watch — deserves recognition as having been to some extent the fore- runner of Wilkie, and the first to introduce the humorous element which is so important a feature of British genre painting. Wilkie in some respects resembled his great prede- cessor Hogarth, but in the works of the latter the moral to be conveyed is always the first thing to strike the observer, whilst in those of the former kindly humour rather than satire is the predominant feature. Until 1825 Wilkie painted genre pictures exclusively, winning a reputation never surpassed, by his Village Politicians (Fig. 183), Blind Fiddler, the Bent Day, the Village Festi- val, the Letter of Introduction, Duncan Gray, Distraining for Bent (many of them in the national collections at South Kensington and Trafalgar Square), the Penny Wedding, and the Chelsea Pensioners, in the possession of the Duke of Wellington, and many other similar works. These early compositions are mostly of cabinet size, and are all alike characterized by simple and effective treatment of familiar incident. Many of them are crowded with figures ; they