A View near Bologna, Italy

A View near Bologna at Sheffield demonstrates Wilson’s experience of the landscape around the great university city of Emilia-Romagna. Bologna’s position at the foot of the Apennines provided Wilson with landscape subjects that combined the fertile plains of the Po Valley with the dramatic mountain backdrop of the Apennine ridge. 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 composition balances the flat Emilian plain in the foreground with mountain forms in the background. Wilson’s handling of the wide, open space shows his ability to create visual interest in relatively flat terrain.