Lake Albano and Castelgandolfo

Lake Albano and Castelgandolfo at the Lady Lever Art Gallery depicts the volcanic crater lake in the Alban Hills that served as the summer residence of the Pope. Lake Albano, one of Wilson’s most popular Italian subjects, combined natural beauty with associations of papal grandeur and classical antiquity that appealed to his Grand Tour 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 elevated viewpoint reveals the circular form of the crater lake with Castelgandolfo perched on its rim. Wilson’s rendering of the lake’s still surface and surrounding wooded slopes demonstrates his mastery of Italian landscape effects.