The Banks of the Tiber, Rome, Italy

The Banks of the Tiber at Temple Newsam records the river that was central to Wilson’s experience of Rome. The Tiber banks, dotted with ancient ruins and pastoral scenes, provided endless material for landscape painters and embodied the layering of history and nature that characterized the Roman campagna’s appeal to 18th-century artists. 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 renders the Tiber banks with warm Italian light and carefully observed vegetation. The composition follows a winding river bank that leads the eye into the distance through multiple planes of depth.