Ruins of a Villa near Rome (Hadrian's Villa)

Ruins of a Villa near Rome at the Nottingham Museums depicts what may be remains of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, the vast 2nd-century imperial retreat that was among the most important archaeological sites visited by Grand Tour travelers. Wilson’s paintings of these ruins helped disseminate knowledge of classical architecture among his British audience. 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 villa ruins provide strong geometric forms that Wilson integrates with the organic forms of vegetation and terrain. Warm light on the ancient masonry creates an elegiac atmosphere of beautiful decay.