Landscape in Italy

Landscape in Italy from 1748 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum represents Wilson’s imagined Italian landscape before he actually visited Italy in 1750. Such pre-Italian Italian subjects demonstrate the powerful hold that the idea of Italian landscape held over British painters, shaped by reproductive engravings and the works of Claude and Poussin available in British collections. 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 follows Claudean conventions with warm light, classical architecture, and pastoral figures. Wilson’s pre-Italian technique, while competent, shows the difference that direct Italian experience would make to his atmospheric effects.