The Village Recruit

The Village Recruit is an 1805 genre painting by the Scottish artist David [Wilkie (artist)|David Wilkie]. Painted at the time of the Napoleonic Wars it shows a recruiting party of the British Army in a country tavern where one young man has just enlisted and prepares to spend his King's shilling on further alcohol. It was painted when Wilkie was around twenty, the year he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy. It was one of three paintings that were spin-offs from his 1804 work Pitlessie Fair, which had featured a recruiting party. Influenced like much of Wilkie's work by the old masters of the seventeenth century, it has strong similarities to his better-known work The Village Politicians. It was initially known by the alternative title Bounty Money.
The work was not publicly exhibited in Willkie's lifetime. In the 1830s it was engraved as a print. A version of the painting is in the collection of the Fusilier Museum in Bury, Greater Manchester.