For Wilkie’s second royal commission he chose to portray a distinctively Scottish subject – more so than in any painting he had produced since leaving Fife in 1805. The scene shows a ‘penny wedding’, at which guests contributed a penny towards the festivities. The custom was dying out by the early nineteenth century, so Wilkie’s vision is a nostalgic depiction of the traditions of ‘Old Scotland’. Painted for George IV, when Prince Regent, 1818