On the Arno, Italy

This painting of the Arno in Italy from around 1748 by Richard Wilson depicts the river that flows through Florence, painted during Wilson's formative Italian journey. Wilson, the father of British landscape painting, spent seven years in Italy (1750-1757) absorbing the lessons of Claude Lorrain and the Italian landscape tradition. 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 Italian river scene shows Wilson developing the classical landscape approach he would bring to British subjects, with warm atmospheric light and balanced composition reflecting Claude's influence.