rchitectural forms with trees, and the isolation of a building between the further mass and the edge of the picture; and the hazy atmosphere through which shines the nostalgic light of the afternoon sun, more muted in Wilson than in Claude. What Wilson brought of his own to these Claudian prescriptions was a keen eye for topographical character, so that even the ideal looks particular, the glow that he admired in his favourit Dutch masters, and an imagination steeped in those aspects of classical history and literature which appealed either to his love of the sublime or his taste for the civilized The final stage of emancipation from the pictorial conventions of the Masters whom he had taken as models may be illustrated by comparing “Snowdon from Llyn Nantle”, in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, of which versions probably go back to 1766, with the undated but later “Cader Idris” (possibly 1774), in the National Gallery in London. The first is one of the most abstract of his classical compositions, a skeletal scheme of divided areas in which the colours are broadly applied with such mastery of tonality that the illusion of depth is almost stereoscopic in its intensity. The foreground is beautifully related to the lake and mountain, but artificial. On this viewpoint of romantic wonder, Wilson has stopped short of dehumanizing the landscape. It is equally distinct from the wildness of Salvator Rosa and “il riposo di Claudio”. Wilson may have sometimes made his English rivers look like Arno, just as his Welsh lakes can conjure up Lake Nemi. Even here, his choice of the mountain scene may have been influenced by the recollection of the crater of Vesuvius. The two real landscapes of Italy and Britain were as interwind in his imagination as were the painted ones of Claude and the Dutch school. Before nature he freed himself from dependence on his masters, and came clo...
