The Penny Wedding by Sir David Wilkie
In the bottom right corner of a painting there is a set of items - a basin, a plate... - I wonder what are these items for (the basin especially) and why are they standing there, on a floor, far away from a dining table.
UPDATE
After some googling I've found a comment on the painting at "Bride Ales and Penny Weddings" by R.A. Houston - and these items are mentioned:
Originally entitled "The Scotch wedding", David Wilkie's painting , "The penny wedding" (1818), was geographically vague, though the Highland piper in the centre background looks decidedly out of place. Wilkie had toured the Highlands in 1817 before he painted "The penny wedding" and was particularly influenced by Perthshire. but he chose to fudge the geography of the celebration. If anything the costume is Lowland and the earlier Dutch-genre paintings of Scottish weddings on which his work drew, such as Emanuel De Witte's "The village dance" or "Lowland wedding", were explicitly Lowland, The clothing is at least a generation out of date. From this and the even older still-life artifacts in the immediate right foreground, we must conclude that the artist sought to suggest to his primarily English audience that this was something from the past. As articulations within a recognized order of symbols, clothes signified both time period and political orientation, here perhaps suggesting that Scottish society was moving on. Similarly the token Highlander indicates that the Highland threat had long passed and that Highlanders should be derided, pitied or romanticized. In Scotland itself a process of displacement was also taking place - perhaps perceptual, perhaps real - for contributory bridals became generically known during the eighteen century as "country weddings" where before they were prominently urban. Thus Wilkie drew on the ideas of the Romantic movement to give his viewers an image of what they wanted to believe about Scottish society.
