One of the earliest major British landscape painters, whose works combine a mood of classicalGLOSSARYRelating to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome (classical Antiquity). The classical world played a profoundly important role in the Renaissance, with Italian scholars, writers, and artists seeing their own period as the rebirth (the "renaissance") of classical values after the Middle Ages. The classical world was considered the golden age for the arts, literature, philosophy, and politics. Concepts of the classical, however, changed greatly from one period to the next. Roman literature provided the starting point in the 14th century, scholars patiently finding, editing and translating a wide range of texts. In the 15th century Greek literature, philosophy and art - together with the close study of the remains of Roman buildings and sculptures-expanded the concept of the classical and ensured it remained a vital source of ideas and inspiration. serenity with picturesqueGLOSSARYTerm covering a set of attitudes towards landscape, both real and painted, that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It indicated an aesthetic approach that found pleasure in roughness and irregularity, and an attempt was made to establish it as a critical category between the 'beautiful' and the 'Sublime'. Picturesque scenes were thus neither serene (like the beautiful) nor awe-inspiring (like the Sublime), but full of variety, curious details, and interesting textures — medieval ruins were quintessentially Picturesque. Natural scenery tended to be judged in terms of how closely it approximated to the paintings of favoured artists such as Gaspard Dughet, and in 1801 the Supplement to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary by George Mason defined 'Picturesque as: 'what pleases the eye; remarkable for singularity; striking the imagination with the force of painting; to be expressed in painting; affording a good subject for a landscape; proper to take a landscape from.' The Picturesque Tour in search of suitable subjects was a feature of English landscape painting of the period, exemplified, for example, in the work of Girtin and (early in his career) of Turner, and the Picturesque generated a large literary output; much of it was pedantic and obsessive and it became a popular subject for satire. effects.
In 1729 Wilson studied portraiture with Thomas Wright in London and after about 1735 worked on his own in this genreGLOSSARYIn a broad sense, the term is used to mean a particular branch or category of art; landscape and portraiture, for example, are genres of painting, and the essay and the short story are genres of literature.. From 1746 his work shows a growing interest in landscape that, soon after his arrival in Italy late in 1750, became almost exclusive. Staying at first in Venice, he met the landscape painter Francesco Zuccarelli. Early in 1752 he went to Rome and became part of an art circle that included the painters Joseph Vernet and Anton Raphael Mengs. He remained in Rome until 1757, working mostly for aristocratic English tourists. He produced not only large landscapes in the manner of Nicolas Poussin, Salvator Rosa, and Claude Lorrain but also numerous drawings of Roman sites and buildings, which he used in composing Italianate landscapes after his return to England. The finest of these is a set of drawings made for Lord Dartmouth and dated 1754. They show how Wilson tempered his delicate observation of light and distance with the discipline of such 17th-century classical BaroqueGLOSSARYThe period in art history from about 1600 to about 1750. In this sense the term covers a wide range of styles and artists. In painting and sculpture there were three main forms of Baroque: (1) sumptuous display, a style associated with the Catholic Counter Reformation and the absolutist courts of Europe (Bernini, Rubens); (2) dramatic realism (Caravaggio); and (3) everyday realism, a development seen in particular in Holland (Rembrandt, Vermeer). In architecture, there was an emphasis on expressiveness and grandeur, achieved through scale, the dramatic use of light and shadow, and increasingly elaborate decoration. In a more limited sense the term Baroque often refers to the first of these categories. The development of the Baroque reflects the period's religious tensions (Catholic versus Protestant); a new and more expansive world view based on science and exploration; and the growth of absolutist monarchies. painters as Poussin and Claude. Returning to London probably in 1757, he became influential as a teacher and, after 1760, as an exhibitor with the Society of Artists and the Royal Academy. He was a founding member of the academy in 1768 and, from 1776, its librarian, a post he took to relieve his poverty.
Though continuing to produce Italian landscapes, Wilson now turned to depicting his own country, especially Wales and the rural environs of London. The order and clarity rather than the classical apparatus of Italy survive, and Wilson's exact and tranquil recording of clear or suffused air, distance, and varied lights predominates, as in his famed Snowdon. His landscapes of this period exerted considerable influence on J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and John Crome. Wilson's later works, such as Minchenden House, tend to abandon formal composition, using tonal methods of recording space. Many works ascribed to him, especially late ones, are partly the work of his pupils.
