The Village Recruit is an 1805 genre painting by the Scottish artist David Wilkie.

[1][2] Painted at the time of the Napoleonic Wars it shows a recruiting party of the British Army in a country tavern where one young man has just enlisted and prepares to spend his King's shilling on further alcohol.

[3] It was painted when Wilkie was around twenty, the year he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy.

It was one of three paintings that were spin-offs from his 1804 work Pitlessie Fair, which had featured a recruiting party.

[7] A version of the painting is in the collection of the Fusilier Museum in Bury, Greater Manchester.