Italian Landscape (Lake Avernus) with Figures

Italian Landscape (Lake Avernus) with Figures from 1750 at Towneley Hall represents one of Wilson’s earliest treatments of this mythologically charged site. Lake Avernus, the volcanic crater Virgil described as the gateway to the underworld, would become one of Wilson’s signature subjects, painted in numerous versions over the following decades. 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 figures in the foreground establish human scale against the lake and surrounding volcanic terrain. Wilson’s early handling of Italian light shows the warm, golden tones he would develop further during his Roman residency.