Study for "The Peep-O’-Day Boys’ Cabin, in the West of Ireland" ("The Sleeping Whiteboy") (1835): Art, History and Details

Study for "The Peep-O’-Day Boys’ Cabin, in the West of Ireland" ("The Sleeping Whiteboy") (1835) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is David Wilkie (British, 1785–1841).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

One of the greatest draftsmen of the British school, Sir David Wilkie painted slowly but drew prolifically, making studies upon which he relied to spur his imagination and compose his paintings. In this study for a painting exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1836, the artist worked out the details of a domestic interior. Here he depicted the corner of a cabin in Ireland where wool was processed: a pair of carders used to disentangle textile fibers and a spinning wheel rest upon a rough-hewn bench, and a swath of hand-dyed red cloth is flung over a ladder rung.

Object facts

• Title: Study for "The Peep-O’-Day Boys’ Cabin, in the West of Ireland" ("The Sleeping Whiteboy")
• Date: 1835
• Creator attribution: David Wilkie (British, 1785–1841)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor, point of brush, and gouache with graphite and brown ink
• Dimensions: Sheet: 23.4 x 21.9 cm (9 3/16 x 8 5/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1941.606

A detail from the museum

The painting to which this drawing relates was purchased by the prominent collector Robert Vernon and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1836.

Collection credit

Gift of Robert Hays Gries

Further reading listed by the museum

• Johnson, Mark M. Idea to Image: Preparatory Studies from the Renaissance to Impressionism. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980.
• Lemonedes, Heather. British Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.