Saint George and the Dragon

Blind Man's Buff, painted in 1812, depicts the popular parlor game in a Scottish farmhouse interior charged with the warmth of domestic festivity. The composition skillfully manages a large group of figures in a small space, each participant individualized in age, expression, and social position. Wilkie had absorbed Dutch genre painting — Steen, Ostade, Teniers — and applied its tradition of social observation to specifically Scottish subjects, creating a genre of British social painting that was enormously popular. The painting's detailed observation of costume, domestic furnishing, and human behavior made it both an entertainment and a document of Scottish rural life, demonstrating Wilkie's ability to combine the formal traditions of European genre painting with acute observation of his own national culture.

The armored saint on horseback attacks the dragon in a composition of violent, spiraling movement. Signorelli's precise anatomical rendering extends to the horse's musculature, while the dragon is depicted with convincing menace.