Lake Averno

Lake Averno at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery depicts the volcanic crater lake near Naples that Virgil identified as the entrance to the underworld in the Aeneid. Wilson painted this mythologically charged landscape in multiple versions, drawn to its combination of natural beauty and literary resonance that epitomized the Grand Tour experience. Richard Wilson's Italian landscapes were the foundation on which his entire career was built. The years he spent in Rome in the 1750s, studying the work of Claude Lorrain and Gaspar Dughet in the landscape of the Roman campagna that had inspired them, gave him the compositional intelligence and tonal discipline that distinguished his mature work from the topographical painting that preceded him in British art. His Italian subjects — the Alban Hills, the volcanic lakes, the ruins of the campagna — were produced both for the British tourists who wanted souvenirs of their Grand Tour and for the collector market in London that was learning to value landscape painting as a serious genre.

The still, dark waters of the crater lake create a sense of depth and mystery appropriate to its mythological associations. Wilson’s palette is warmer and more golden than in his British subjects.