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. The reading of a will provided the painter with an excellent opportunity for a somewhat sarcastic view of human nature and the exposure of various greedy or spiteful reactions. 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.