Wheatley, Francis (1747–1801), artist, was born in Wild Court, Covent Garden, London, son of a master tailor; no other details of his parents are known. He studied under the artist Daniel Fournier (c.1700–c.1766) and in William Shipley's drawing school, where he won prizes in 1762 and 1763. Two years later he had his first exhibition in the Society of Artists, of which he became a member (1770) and a director (1774). By this time he had built up a reputation as a portrait and landscape artist; however, he fell perennially into debt and was a womaniser, and in 1779 was taken to court by the artist John Alexander Gresse for seducing his wife. The court awarded £32 in costs against Wheatley, who promptly borrowed the amount from the artist Benjamin West, whom he never repaid, and departed for Ireland with Mrs Gresse, passing her off as his wife. He had previously visited Ireland in 1766; his second visit provided the opportunity for him to develop ‘from a painter of pretty rural scenes and small portraits into the ambitious and difficult line of large groups’ (Roberts, 9). James Gandon (qv) noted that Wheatley arrived in Dublin at an auspicious time; his first work was ‘Dublin Volunteers on College Green’, a representation from life of the Volunteers parading on 4 November 1779 to celebrate the anniversary of William III's (qv) birth and his landing in England. It depicts, among others, John Fitzgibbon (qv), afterwards earl of Clare, James Napper Tandy (qv), and the Russian Princess Dashkova, who was on a tour of Europe. Exhibited in the Irish Society of Artists on William St. (1780), it excited much interest, and the following year Wheatley announced a raffle to dispose of it, the outcome of which is unknown. By 1784 it was in the possession of the duke of Leinster (it was presented to the NGI by the 5th duke in 1891).
Wheatley's next project was even more ambitious, ‘The Irish house of commons’ caught at the specific moment of the motion by Henry Grattan (qv) for the repeal of Poynings’ law on 19 April 1780. It is the only accurate view of the interior by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce (qv), which was destroyed by fire in 1792. Disposed of by raffle in 1783, it was subsequently in the possession of the Gascoigne family, who donated it to the Leeds City art gallery in the late twentieth century. Two more large paintings executed in Dublin were also depictions of the Volunteers, ‘The review of troops in the Phoenix Park by Sir John Irwin’ and ‘Lord Aldborough on Pomposo’. These paintings, principally the first two mentioned, are of great Irish interest, being among the few depictions of historic events in the country by an artist on the scene. They are also of importance to art historians, as they mark a new departure in Wheatley's style. However, his critic and biographer, Mary Webster, notes that while these paintings are lucid, attractive, and accurate in portraiture, they do ‘not succeed in organising innumerable smaller components into a singular convincing action. There is not enough “excitement”. Whatever drama the situation may have had is lost in a literal rendering of the scene’ (Webster, 27). However, Crookshank and Glin consider Wheatley's paintings to have ‘captured the late eighteenth-century Irish scene better than most because of their fluency, clarity, and gaiety’ (Crookshank & Glin, 160).
While in Ireland, Wheatley also executed a number of portraits, chief among them being that of Grattan, and also brought out watercolours of rustic scenes around Kildare, Dublin, and Wicklow, engravings of which were extremely popular. Elegant and well mannered, he was popular in fashionable society; however, his deception with Mrs Gresse being discovered, he was forced to return to London in late 1783. He further developed his historical painting with ‘The Gordon riots’, which was subsequently destroyed by fire but which, judging by the engraving, showed a distinct heightening of dramatic effect. However, he worked no further with large canvases after being taken up by John Boydell, entrepreneur and print-seller, who kept him turning out a steady stream of portraits and rustic and anecdotal scenes. The most successful were the ‘Cries of London’, a set of fourteen paintings of London street scenes which were criticised even in their own day for their sentimentality, but engravings of which enjoyed a vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after which they were adapted to china, biscuit tins, and Christmas cards. Another scheme of Boydell's, though unsuccessful, was the 1786 Shakespeare gallery, for which Wheatley and other artists produced illustrations of scenes from the plays. In 1790 he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy and the following year became an academician. His final years were made miserable by ill health and debt, which he met by selling his house and goods in Russell Place in 1793. Three years later he was arrested in Bath for failure to pay debts. Suffering from bad eyesight and crippled hands, he died destitute in London 28 June 1801 and was buried in the cemetery of St Marylebone church, Middlesex. The RA provided a pension for his four children and his wife (m. c.1787), the former Clara Maria Leigh, a noted beauty who was said to be his second wife; the first may have been Rosamund Mann (m. 1774). Clara Wheatley proved self-sufficient; she was herself an artist who exhibited in the RA from 1796 to 1838 and was thrifty, though her fortune was dissipated by her second husband, the Irish actor Alexander Pope (qv).