Crummock Lake from near Loweswater Chapel

Crummock Lake from near Loweswater Chapel of 1750 at Abbot Hall Art Gallery records one of Wilson’s rare excursions to the English Lake District before his Italian journey. Crummock Water, a lake in Cumbria’s western fells, anticipates the landscape subjects that later artists like Constable and Turner would make famous in this region. 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 mountain-framed lake composition demonstrates Wilson’s early landscape style before Italian influences. The cool, northern light and atmospheric effects capture the distinctive character of the Cumbrian landscape.