The Lago di Agnano

The Lago di Agnano, painted in 1752 at the Ashmolean Museum, records one of Wilson’s early Italian subjects from his formative years in the Bay of Naples region. Lake Agnano, another volcanic crater lake near Naples, was part of the standard Grand Tour itinerary and had been painted by numerous artists before Wilson brought his distinctive atmospheric sensibility to the subject. Richard Wilson, the Welsh painter who studied in Italy in the 1750s and returned to transform British landscape painting, was among the most important artistic figures of eighteenth-century Britain despite dying in comparative poverty and neglect. His synthesis of the classical landscape tradition he had absorbed in Rome with the specific visual qualities of British scenery — the cooler light, the greener landscape, the atmospheric moisture of the northern climate — established a template for British landscape painting that Turner, Constable, and the watercolor tradition would develop and transform. His work was foundational precisely because it treated British scenery as worthy of the same serious formal attention that Claude had given to the Roman campagna.

Wilson captures the characteristic stillness of the volcanic lake with carefully graduated tonal values. The surrounding terrain is rendered with attention to the distinctive forms of the Neapolitan volcanic landscape.