An American painter, draftsman, illustrator and educator, Robert D. Wilkie was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia (then a British colony now a part of Canada) and died in Swampscott, Massachusetts. He had lived in Boston and its environs (Roxbury) since the early 1850s. In addition to easel painting and teaching, Wilkie did illustrations for periodicals such as Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion and Frank Leslie’s Weekly, and his works were reproduced as chromolithographs by Louis Prang.