he Huntington Art Gallery illustrates the various strands that united to form his final style. The third of the trinity who led the Classical Age of British Painting was Richard Wilson (1714-1782). The third son of the rector of the University of Penygoes in Montgomeryshire, he was connected by birth with several notable landowning families and under his father received an excellent classical education. In 1729 he was sent to London “to indulge his prevailing love for the arts of design”, a euphemism of six years’ training under the obscure portrait painter and copyist Thomas Wright, possibly a pupil of Thomas Hudson. When his training was over he was helped by his family connections to get portrait comissions, including one from the Royal family. Before he left for Italy in 1750 he painted portraits which modernized the Kneller- Dahl tradition, attempted conversation pieces and sentimental fancy pictures, and made a reputation among artists for topographical landscape. The landscapes known to have been painted in England prior to his departure are in the topographical tradition to which the Thames Estuary School had imparted a new vitality. “Westminster Bridge” in the Philadelphia Museum of Art deserves a creditable place among those Thames scenes which show that direct and independent observation of light and atmosphere was firmly entrenched before the arrival of Canaletto in the following year exposed the native practitioners to the seductions of his Venetian style. “Wilson at his best”, writes Lord Clark, “understood the two chief lessons of Claude, that the center of the landscape is an area of light and that everything must be subordinated to a single mood”. W.G. Constable has listed the main compositional correspondences with the seventeenth century master: the parallel recession of frontal planes; the trees in silhouette- like side-wings; the combination of a...
