The Quiet Observer of the Natural World Born in the coastal air of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Robert David Wilkie began to find his voice through the brush around 1849. His early years in the British colony provided a foundation for a life that would eventually find its center in the bustling artistic circles of the American East. By the middle of the nineteenth century, his hand was already busy contributing landscape views to publications like Gleason's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion. He was a man of many roles, moving through the world as a painter, a draftsman, and an educator, always seeki…