Francis Wheatley (1747-1801) was an English painter of portraits, landscapes and sentimental genre scenes, remembered today above all for his Cries of London, a series of paintings depicting the street vendors and hawkers of Georgian London that remain among the most reproduced images of eighteenth-century English life. Born in Covent Garden, the son of a master tailor, he trained at William Shipley's drawing school and the Royal Academy, winning several prizes from the Society of Arts as a young man, and grew up in close proximity to the very street life he would later immortalise in paint.
Wheatley's career combined real success with recurring personal and financial difficulty. He spent several years in Ireland from 1779, painting portraits of political figures and his celebrated group picture The Irish House of Commons, before a scandal over his elopement with a married woman forced his return to London in 1783. Taken up by the print publisher and entrepreneur John Boydell, he settled into a productive period of portraits and rustic, anecdotal genre scenes deliberately pitched, in the manner of the French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze, to appeal to popular taste and to translate well into the fashionable stipple engravings of the day. It was under Boydell's patronage that Wheatley produced the fourteen paintings of the Cries of London between 1792 and 1795, sentimental and idealised images that nonetheless placed ordinary working people, chiefly women street-sellers, at the centre of the composition; his own wife, herself an exhibiting artist, is thought to have modelled for several of the figures. Elected a Royal Academician in 1791, Wheatley's later years were overshadowed by debt, gout and declining health, and he died in London in 1801, leaving his wife and four daughters to a pension provided by the Royal Academy.
The painting by Wheatley held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, Courtship and Matrimony, a pair, exemplifies the sentimental, narrative genre subjects for which he found his most reliable audience throughout his career, and represents a genuinely significant if imperfect figure in the history of English genre painting, whose Cries of London remain, to this day, instantly recognisable images of Georgian London.