View at Tivoli

View at Tivoli from 1760 at the National Museum Cardiff depicts the hilltown east of Rome famous for its waterfalls, the Villa d’Este, and the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa. Wilson painted Tivoli subjects throughout his career, as the town exemplified the classical landscape ideal that was central to his artistic vision. 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.

Wilson captures Tivoli’s dramatic hillside setting with architectural elements visible among the vegetation. The warm Italian light and careful atmospheric rendering demonstrate Wilson’s fully developed post-Italian style.