English Masters Of The Eighteenth Century

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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The greatest of Hogarth’s contemporaries, the link indeed between him and Sir Joshua Reynolds, was the artist known as ‘The Father of British Landscape,’ Richard Wilson. His is one of the saddest stories in British Art, for, though acknowledged to be one of the most eminent men of his day, and attaining a modest measure of success in middle life, fortune, through no fault of his own, turned her back on him, and his later years were spent in the direst poverty.

Richard Wilson was born at Penegoes in Montgomeryshire on August 1, 1744, the day Queen Anne died and George I ascended the throne. His father was a clergyman of limited means, but his mother was well connected, and one of her well-off relatives took sufficient interest in young Richard’s talent for drawing to have him sent to London to learn painting. Though it is by his landscapes that Wilson acquired lasting fame, he began life as a portrait-painter; one of his earlier portraits of himself is in the National Gallery, while a very much later portrait, is in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy. This magnificent work which speaks for itself, is enough to prove that even in portrait-painting Wilson had, among his immediate predecessors, no equal saving Hogarth.

Like Hogarth, Wilson was a sturdy, independent disposition, little inclined to truckle to the conceit of fashionable sitters or to flatter their vanity, and consequently he was not the man to make it the staff of his professional practice, though in 1748 he had acquired a considerable practice, though in 1748 he had acquired a considerable eminence in this branch of art. IN this year he was commissioned to paint a group of the Prince of Wales and Duke of York with their tutor—a portion of which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery—and with the money earned by this and other commissions he decided in the following year to carry out a long cherished wish to visit Italy.

Hitherto there has been a general belief that Wilson did not attempt landscape painting till he found himself in Italy, but it has recently been ascertained that he unquestionably painted landscapes before he left England.

In Italy Wilson devoted more and more of his time to landscape till he finally established himself in Rome as a landscape-painter, only doing an occasional portrait. His beautiful pictures of Italian landscapes, in which dignity of design was combined with atmospheric truth and loveliness of color, soon gained him a great reputation in that city, and his landscapes were bought by the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Thanet, the Earl of Essex, Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Dartmouth, and other Englishmen of high rank who were visiting Italy. Consequently, when he returned to England in 1756, his reputation preceded him and he enjoyed a considerable measure of success when he first established himself in London at Covent Garden. But unfortunately for Wilson, the taste of the eighteenth century was severely classical, and after the first novelty of his Italian landscapes wore off, only one or two enlightened patrons, like Sir Richard Ford, were capable of appreciating the originality and beauty of the landscapes he painted in England. Thanks to the discrimination of Sir Richard and Lady Ford, the best collection in the world of landscapes by Richard Wilson is still in the possession of the family. It is only in the Ford Collection that the full measure of Wilson’s greatness can be seen, for while the splendor of the flaming sunset sky in ‘The Tiber, with Rome in the Distance’ reveals how Wilson showed the way to Turner, the sweet simplicity and natural beauty of ‘The Thames near Twickenham’ proves him also to have been the artistic ancestor of Constable.

Wilson’s English landscapes went begging in his own day. His memorandum-book, preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, shows how he sent them out on approval and often had them returned. As his fortunes dwindled, Wilson despairingly set about painting replicas of the Italian landscapes which he had found more saleable, and these repetitions of his Italian scenes have done much harm to his reputation in succeeding years, for the later Italian pictures do not always attain the quality of the first version when the painter was freshly inspired by the original scenery.

Nevertheless, with the help of one or two unaffected lovers of art and Nature, who bought his English landscapes, and more who bought repetitions of his Italian scenes, and with the fees of his pupils—among whom was the diarist, Joseph Farington, R.A—Wilson managed for some years to make a tolerable living, and when the Royal Academy was established in 1768, George III—who in his boyhood had had his portrait done by this landscape painter—nominated Richard Wilson as one of the founder members of the Academy. At the Academy exhibitions Wilson with credit, if without much commercial success, and nothing serious happened till 1776, when he sent a picture of ‘Sion House from Kew Gardens,’ which the King thought of buying.

Unfortunately he sent Lord Bute to bargain with the artist, and this canny nobleman thought the price asked, sixty guineas, was ‘too dear’. ‘Tell His Majesty,’ said Wilson roguishly, ‘that he may pay for it by instalments.’ Had an Irish peer been the intermediary he might have seen the joke and have made Wilson’s fortune, but Lord Bute belonged to a race that is reputed to take money very seriously, and to be not too quick at grasping the English sense of humor. He was shocked and scandalized, deeming the answer insulting to royalty.

The harmless gibe cost Wilson what little Court favor he had, and proved to be his ruin. Fortunately, before this disastrous retort had been made, he had secured the Librarianship of the Royal Academy, and the salary of this post, fifty pounds a year, was all Wilson had to live on during his later years. His few patrons fell away from him, his brother Academicians—most of whom had been rather jealous—now shunned him, and he lived in a miserable garret in Tottenham Street, Tottenham Court Road, existing chiefly on bread and porter. He had always been fond of the last—‘though not to excess,’ said Beechey, R.A., who knew him intimately—and want of nourishment rather than excess of liquor wrought sad changes in his countenance, so that he became known as ‘red-nosed Dick.’

Just before the end he had a year or two of quiet and comfort, for he left London and made his home with his relatives in Wales, where he died, at Llanberis, in 1782. Wilson did not altogether abandon portrait-painting when he returned from Italy, and in addition to the noble portrait of himself, there is in the Academy’s Diploma Gallery a very beautiful full-length of the young artist Mortimer, whom he painted about the same time. A splendid portrait of Peg Woffington, very rich in color, which hangs in the Garrick Club, is another example of Wilson’s portraiture after his return from Italy.

Richard Wilson was the first English artist to show his countrymen not only the beauty of Nature but the beauty of their own country. He should not be judged by such large pictures as ‘Niobe’ and ‘The Villa of Mæcenas,’ which he painted ‘to order,’ but rather—so far as the National Gallery is concerned—by his exquisite ‘Italian Coast Scene’ and ‘On the Wye,’ which together show how beautifully and truly Wilson rendered the characteristic scenery of the two countries he so deeply loved.

English Masters Of The Eighteenth Century (continued)