Backwater of the Severn

Backwater of the Severn at the Newport Museum depicts a scene on the river that flows through Wilson’s native Wales into England. The Severn, Britain’s longest river, provided Wilson with subjects close to his Welsh roots that he could invest with the classical landscape dignity he had learned in Italy. 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.

The still backwater creates mirror-like reflections that Wilson exploits for compositional symmetry. The surrounding vegetation is rendered with careful attention to the specific character of riparian landscape.