River Scene in Italy

River Scene in Italy at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery draws on Wilson’s seven years of sketching and painting along Italian rivers. The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea holds a significant collection of Wilson’s work, reflecting both the gallery’s Welsh connections and the importance of Wilson as the greatest Welsh painter of the 18th century. 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’s Italian river scenes typically feature warm, golden light and gently rolling terrain. The composition uses the river as a structural element guiding the viewer through successive planes of depth.