A fellow student of Wilkie at the Trustees Academy, Lizars achieved temporary celebrity as a domestic genre painter when A Scotch Wedding and Reading the Will were exhibited in Edinburgh by the Associated Artists in 1811 and in London at the Royal Academy the following year. In this painting he added humour and incident to the scene of celebrations following the wedding ceremony. A drunken man has fallen on the floor and smashed some plates, and in the background lively dancers enjoy the music played by the fiddler perched on the barrel. Lizars evidently attached great importance to these two early pictures. In 1861 his widow presented them to the new National Gallery of Scotland in fulfilment of the artist’s wishes.