The first major exhibition devoted to Richard Wilson (1714–1782) in thirty years has opened at the beautiful Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. It explores Wilson’s work in its broader European contexts, focusing on his transformative experience in Rome, where he spent nearly seven years in the 1750s. It explores how Wilson, as the “father of British landscape painting,” marketed his landscape art upon his return to England and how his work was understood after his death, influencing a generation of artists including John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. Many of Wilson’s greatest paintings and drawings are featured, along with key paintings by the earlier masters Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet, as well as by Wilson’s contemporaries such as Pompeo Batoni, Anton Raphael Mengs, Francesco Zuccarelli, Charles Joseph Natoire, Joseph Vernet, Louis Gabriel Blanchet, and others. Finally, the exhibition reveals how Wilson’s international pupils in Rome went on to become influential figures in their native countries.
Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting has been co-organized by the Center and Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales. It will be on view at National Museum Cardiff from July 5 to October 26, 2014. The exhibition is co-curated by Robin Simon, Honorary Professor of English, University College London, and Editor, The British Art Journal, and Martin Postle, Deputy Director of Studies, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London. The organizing curator at the Center is Scott Wilcox, Chief Curator of Art Collections and Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings; and, at Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales, Oliver Fairclough, Keeper of Art. The exhibition is accompanied by a book of the same title, published by the Center and Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales, in association with Yale University Press.
(Image caption): Richard Wilson, Rome from the Villa Madama, 1753, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon