Pitlessie

An Artists Village

Pitlessie is a village made famous by an artist. We find it a quiet place, a few houses and a village hall sitting sleepily on the sides of the road which follows the valley of the Eden from Kingskettle to Cupar. But however quiet Pitlessie village might appear to be, we who have seen the famous painting will try and see in it some of the animation and colour of Wilkie's Pitlessie Fair.

David Wilkie was born on 18th November, 1785, at the manse of Cults, tucked away in the rich farmland hills a mile from the village. The old manse that David Wilkie knew is gone. It was burned down in 1926, and lost in that blaze were the drawings the young David had done on the attic walls. From his earliest years David Wilkie loved to sketch. It was said of him when he was a boy at Pitlessie school that he best liked "to lie agroufe on the grun, wi' his slate and pencil". That pencil was never idle. Not even when his father, the minister of Cults, was in the pulpit. During the sermons the young David was sketching. His father's church was his first studio; his father's parishioners were his first models.

His talent as an artist was soon apparent, and when he was 14 he was sent to Edinburgh to study. In 1804, at the age of 19, he began work on a picture, the first in the style he was to make his own. It was the picture that was to make the name of the village of Pitlessie immortal. He had not forgotten the parishioner models. One hundred and fifty of them he crowded on to the small canvas of Pitlessie Fair. They served him again, those parishioners, for his next famous picture. The Village Politicians.

David Wilkie was very soon acclaimed as Scotland's greatest painter. After the death of Raeburn in 1823 he was appointed Limner to the King in Scotland; seven years later he succeeded Lawrence as Painter-in-Ordinary. He was returning from a visit to the Near East in 1841 when he died aboard ship off Gibraltar and was buried at sea. The tablet to his memory in the church of Cults describes him as Painter-in-Ordinary in England and Limner in Scotland to three monarchs-King George IV, King William IV and Queen Victoria.

Font was a War Trophy

One of the church's strangest possessions is the baptismal font. So striking a piece of Eastern craftsmanship it is that we are surprised to meet it in a Scottish kirk. It is actually a "war trophy" brought to Scotland from the Crimea by a ship's captain.

The little lantern belfry atop the plain square church is also well worth examination. It is built of two tiers of squat, four-sided pillars and gives the appearance of being a most ancient belfry. It is when we compare its pillars with those supporting the slabs over the graves in the churchyard that we begin to ask where the elders might have acquired the stone for this attractive antique belfry.

The little building with a pantile roof near to the church is not, though it appears to be, a cottage. It is the Session House, built peculiarly remote from the main building of the church, and on wet Sundays the minister has been known to use his umbrella when pass-ing from Session House to service. In the tower is a private door to the "Laird's Pew" in the gallery. The gateway to the garden of the manse bears, in Latin, a somewhat bitter message inscribed there by a former minister.

I have reached my harbour.
Hope and fortune farewell;
You have mocked me plenty-away,
and mock some others.

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