Transforming landscape painting
Readers of this blog will remember that I spent some time in America a couple of years ago, researching and visiting museums. I have since had a particularly vivid memory of the day I arrived back in England, getting a bus from Heathrow to Oxford and falling in love anew with the British countryside as it rolled past the window. I remember thinking there was nowhere quite like England's 'green and pleasant land' in the evening sunshine.
I was reminded of that memory today, as I gazed out of the window of my train travelling from Cardiff to Leicester and marvelled at the Welsh landscape. This was particularly as I had spent the morning at the National Museum of Wales visiting their exhibition co-organised with the Yale Centre for British Art, Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting. I looked out of my train window and saw Wilson's landscapes passing beneath me.
You might think this is hardly surprising, Wilson painted Welsh landscapes after all, and I was looking at landscapes in Wales. But it is arguably thanks to Wilson that we might now assume the one will look like the other. It was Wilson who learnt the lessons of European, Italianate landscape painting in Rome - from the works of Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet, Salvator Rosa, Claude-Joseph Vernet - and applied their interest in light, atmosphere and composition to his native landscapes in Wales. Specifically, he largely rejected their use of idealised landscapes with mythological figures, choosing to use their techniques to record genuine landscap views, with real buildings and people as compositional motifs.
Wilson's 'imitation' of these classical landscapes, applying their lessons to his images of the present, raised English landscape painting to the equal of its European counterparts in the eighteenth century. It helped to give his patrons and fellow artists a new-found pride in their native environment, and enjoyment of its beauties. One of Wilson's most important patrons, Watkin Williams-Wynn also employed Capability Brown to transform the gardens of his estate at Wynnstay. So, the Welsh landscape itself transformed in line with ideas of landscape created by Wilson's paintings.
Wilson also trained a generation of landscape artists that included Thomas Jones and William Hodges. The latter is particularly dear to my heart as he features in our current Art and Science of Exploration exhibition in the Queen's House, Greenwich. Through Hodges' work painting the Pacific that he saw voyaging with Captain James Cook, and the Indian landscapes commissioned for Warren Hastings, you can argue that Wilson not only transformed how we see European landscapes, but global ones.