Richard Wilson

New Haven and Cardiff

by DUNCAN ROBINSON

IN 1982 THE Tate Gallery organised in conjunction with the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and the National Museum Wales, Cardiff, an exhibition to mark the bicentenary of the death of Richard Wilson (1714–82). Subtitled ‘The Landscape of Reaction’, it, or rather the catalogue by David Solkin which accompanied it, raised a storm of protest. The Daily Telegraph led the charge, with an editorial under the headline ARCADIA LOST in ‘a morass of confusions and half-baked Marxist thinking [. . .] an insult to Wilson, the Tate and to art history’. Elsewhere, the judgment of the Tate’s Director was questioned for allowing such subversive ideas to invade the realm of eighteenth-cen­tury landscape painting. Yet little more than a decade later, in his magisterial introduction to the fifth edition of Ellis Waterhouse’s Painting in Britain, 1530–1790, Michael Kitson could write that ‘it is not easy to understand what all the fuss was about’, although he went on to chart the progress of that ‘revolution’ (his word) in the study of British Art which had taken place in the intervening years. The dust settled, it is now clear that far from insulting Wilson, Solkin’s pioneering study placed him fairly and squarely within the social and political context of Georgian Britain. His con­clusion that Wilson’s ‘long years of studying nature and tradition produced a painter who perhaps to a greater extent than any of his British predecessors, was capable of transforming patrician mythology into persuasive landscape form’ might well be taken as the starting point for the exhibition Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting, first shown at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, where this reviewer saw it, and currently on show at the National Museum Wales, Cardiff (to 26th October).1 Organised by two of the three participants in the 1982–83 exercise, this marks another anniversary, this time the tercen­tenary of Wilson’s birth. Both the exhibition and the sumptuous catalogue which accompanies it have been masterminded by Martin Postle and Robin Simon, assisted by a team of contributors whose research reinforces their thesis that Wilson deserves to be seen at the heart of the transformation of European landscape painting in the second half of the eight­eenth century, a transformation that began not in the shires of England and Wales but in Rome. It was there, they show, that ‘the father of British landscape painting’ developed his own unique blend of tradition derived from Claude and Gaspard Dughet, with direct observation of nature, influenced perhaps more than they acknowledge by the practice of plein-airisme which was rife among students at the Ecole de Rome.

At Yale the exhibition was introduced by a group of paintings which placed Wilson firmly within the classical landscape tradition, alongside his exact contemporary Claude-Joseph Vernet, the artist who encouraged his ambitions to paint landscapes soon after he arrived in Rome. The juxtaposition of Wilson’s painting of Holt Bridge on the River Dee (cat. no.75) with Claude’s of Rome and the Ponte Molle (no.73) bears out Simon’s point that Claude provided the model (significantly a Roman model) for ‘Wilson’s daring exercise in an intellectual conceit known as an “imitation”, an exercise hitherto largely confined to eighteenth-century literature’. Similarly Wilson’s The destruction of the children of Niobe (no.89) was paired with Vernet’s Mountain landscape with approaching storm (no.105) to suggest ‘an interesting reversal of roles’ between the two artists. The portrait of Wilson by Mengs (no.1) hanging nearby confirmed the inference that Wilson was no mere bystander in the international circle of artists and intellectuals he joined in Rome.

‘Rome in the 1750s’ is evoked by means of a selection of topographical prints and drawings in which Wilson is placed alongside his peers and pupils, including Adolf Friedrich Harper, the subject of a catalogue essay by Steffen Egle. These have been carefully selected to reflect the common interests of a diverse group of foreign artists in both the antiquities of Rome and the observation of nature. Among them, Wilson emerges as a prominent figure, well connected socially, sought after by collectors and represented by the rising star of commercial connoisseurship, Thomas Jenkins, with whom he had the good fortune to share lodgings for a while after they travelled together from Venice to Rome. (Jonathan Yarker’s essay in the catalogue on ‘Marketing Wilson in Rome: The Role of Thomas Jenkins’ includes a wealth of new material on Jenkins and his networks.) The preliminaries completed, the exhibition then centres on ‘Wilson and the Grand Tour’. Here, Simon’s contention that ‘once Wilson had acted on Vernet’s advice, he was transformed from a hesitant creator of parlour landscapes into a landscape painter of the most powerful orig­inality’ can be traced, if not in an instant, in the course of a single year. The two Landscapes with banditti (nos.51 and 52), begun in January 1752, are derivative of that other artist trad­itionally associated with Wilson’s conversion to landscape, Francesco Zuccarelli. Later that year, in the two scenes of Tivoli (nos.57 and 58), the shades of influence are clearly fading in favour of Wilson’s own imprint as his direct observation of the Italian landscape begins to inform his descriptions of it. The clue lies in the background details of the second of them, The temple of the Sibyl and the Campagna (Fig.46) which, as the catalogue note points out, are ‘scratched in through wet paint, suggesting that at least in part this picture [. . .] may have been painted en plein air’. The point is surely reinforced by the fact that both canvases include the figures of artists working outdoors, in one case seated in a distinctly sette­cento pose in front of his easel, and in the other packing up with the help of his assistant at the end of the day. It is also significant that all of these paintings were commissioned by Grand Tourists, as were the two much larger distant views of Rome that Wilson painted for the Earl of Dartmouth in 1753. Confronted by Rome from the Villa Madama (no.60; Fig.47) and Rome: St Peter’s and the Vatican from the Janiculum (no.61) it is impossible to resist Simon’s assertion that they are Wilson’s ‘first two magisterial, utterly distinctive views of Rome. These are landscapes of great originality and power, and display the most profound understanding of tone and aerial perspective’. Dartmouth’s importance as Wilson’s patron is then underlined by the inclusion of six of the sixty-eight drawings Wilson is known to have made for him of views in and around Rome. As Paul Spencer-Longhurst points out in his valuable catalogue essay on the historiography of Wilson, the discovery of twenty-six of these drawings by Brinsley Ford in 1948 had a serious impact on the rehabilitation of Wilson’s reputation. Here they are aptly associated with Joseph Farington’s comment that ‘wherever Wilson studied it was to nature that he principally referred. His admiration of the pictures of Claude could not be exceeded, but he contemplated those excellent works and compared them with what he saw in nature to refine his feeling and make his observations more exact’.

The following two sections of the exhi­bition feature Wilson’s output following his return to London in 1757. They include several of his ‘good breeders’, Italian views he repeated to satisfy the demand for them; The white monk (nos.96 and 97), for instance, of which different versions have been chosen for each venue. At the same time he set about casting ‘Italian light on English walls’, nowhere more effectively than in The ruined arch in Kew Gardens (no.76), a view of William Chambers’s architectural conceit which was mistaken for many years for a view in the grounds of the Villa Borghese. However, it was clearly in his treatment of the landscape of his native Wales, encouraged by a group of Welsh patrons that included the Grand Tourist Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, that Wilson learned to forsake the latitude of Rome in favour of the softer light and specific contours of the British countryside.

A section of the exhibition that begs more questions than it answers is the one entitled ‘Buying and Selling’. It deals with the continued success of engravings after Wilson’s paintings at a time when he had fallen into penury, giving rise to the myth, perpetrated by Fuseli, of an artist suffering ‘the apathy of cognoscenti, the envy of rivals, and the neglect of a tasteless public’. This phenomenon is examined in detail by Martin Postle in his wide-ranging essay on ‘Inspiration and Imitation: Wilson, London and the “School of Rome”’, but in the exhibition it serves to relegate some of Wilson’s most ambitious pictures, his illustrations of classical mythology, to exempla of the commercial acumen of London’s engravers and print-sellers. It may be churlish to complain that an exhibition which champions Wilson as ‘the father of British landscape painting’ downplays his attempt to compete in the fashionable but fiercely contested field of history painting, but it can hardly be irrelevant to a discussion of that ‘increased isolation from his peers’ which Postle detects so perceptively in the withdrawn figure of Wilson as depicted by Zoffany directly behind his nemesis, Reynolds, in The Academicians of the Royal Academy of 1771–72.

The final section of the exhibition, ‘In the Footsteps of Wilson’, looks beyond his sad decline to establish his enduring legacy. It begins with work by pupils such as John Plimmer, Johnson Carr, Robert Crone and William Hodges. With the exception of Thomas Jones, whose Italian landscapes are distinctive and individual, their efforts serve mainly to demonstrate how far their master outclassed them. More speculatively, works by Joseph Wright of Derby and John Downman are included, as well as watercolours and drawings by John Robert Cozens, on the grounds that ‘Wilson’s Italian trip can be viewed as the model for the study undertaken in Italy by a generation of British landscape painters’. Apart from the fact that the selection of artists is somewhat arbitrary, there is no acknowledgment here of a major difference between Wilson, who painted in oils, and those later artists who favoured watercolours. It is arguable that their influence was paramount by the end of the century, that Girtin and Turner owed more to the atmospheric washes of Cozens than to the proto-Romanticism of Wilson’s landscapes, although it is undeniable that Constable reacted to them on an emotional level as ‘solemn, bright, warm, fresh’. Of course Turner followed Wilson in his admiration for Claude, neatly summarised at the end of the exhibition in New Haven by the inclusion of the Yale version of Turner’s Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil (no.158), but in terms of reception, a much earlier work in the same collection, Harlech Castle from Tygwyn Ferry of 1799, would have shown the extent to which for Turner the comparison was inescapable. The reviewer in The Sun of 13th May 1799 wrote: ‘This Landscape, though it combines the style of claude and of our excellent wilson, yet wears an aspect of originality, that shows the painter looks at nature with his own eyes’. Six years later, Farington defended Wilson in similar terms; terms upon which this thoroughly researched and beautifully presented exhi­­bition continues to rely.

1    Catalogue: Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting. Edited by Martin Postle and Robin Simon. 348 pp. incl. 280 col. ills. (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2014), $80. ISBN 978–0–3002–03851.