Lake Avernus

Lake Avernus at the York Art Gallery is another version of Wilson’s most repeated Italian subject, demonstrating the commercial demand for these volcanic lake scenes among British collectors. The multiple versions of Lake Avernus that Wilson produced testify to the subject’s popularity and its embodiment of the classical landscape ideal. 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 varies each version of Lake Avernus through different lighting conditions and figure arrangements while maintaining the essential compositional structure of the crater lake surrounded by wooded hills.