Palmerston Fair I

While living in Dublin, Wheatley began to draw and paint the large fairs that took place outside the city each summer. Though a location is specified in the drawing’s title, Wheatley visited several fairs, making on-the-spot sketches of incidents and figures that he later combined into imaginative compositions. Here, a rustic group gathers outside a tent. A barefoot young woman dispenses ale from a barrel, while a man, clearly
having been overserved, sprawls at left. The scene is gently comic, intended for an elite audience, with a soft palette and relatively innocuous figures. It contradicts the reputation of such fairs, which were infamous for their disorder, amorality, and violence (2022).