Welsh Journals

'Disgusted with what he considered his frivolity, he soon returned to his old pursuit'.1 About 1762, there was also some question of an offence towards George III, which cost Wilson the Royal favour, while about this time certain noble patrons were won over to the more affected and derivative style of George Barret, the elder, who arrived in England in 1762, and quickly copied Wilson's manner in landscape, turning it into a picturesque formula that proved more lucrative than Wilson's honesty to nature and art.2 Zuccarelli was most popular in England up to 1762, when he returned to Italy for some years. This competition coming soon after his establishment in the landscape vogue is also underlined by the action of the Committee of Taste who, deeming Wilson's work 'too refined for the taste of the age', recommended that he adopt 'the lighter style of Zuccarelli'. 3 Things were not all adverse for Wilson. During the sixties Lord Lansdowne devised a scheme for the fostering of an English landscape school, and this could have proved of immense benefit to Wilson. In his account of Bowood John Britton alluded to this: 'Three of these pieces were painted at the request of the Marquis, with a particular injunction that each artist would exert himself to produce his chef- d'oeuvre, as they were intended to lay THE FOUNDATION OF A SCHOOL OF BRITISH LANDSCAPES, the want of which has been often lamented. The Marquis a few years since devised a plan for establishing one'. 4 The three artists referred to here were Wilson, Gainsborough, and Barret, and paintings by each were listed in the Lansdowne Collect- ion in the 1760's. Wilson was thus encouraged to think of a British landscape school. The point of all this discussion about Wilson's fluctuating fortunes is to be found in his decision to adhere to a 'severe' style in landscape, i.e., a style that was intellectual, based on design, and controlled, in which emphasis was put on meaning and significance of the balanced masses rather than on sensuous appeal and bravura. Wilson turned in the sixties to the scenery of Wales, especially the lovely mountain scenes, wherein his naturalism and simple grandeur impressed, without any attempt to dramatize or treat nature in a falsely grand manner. The reaction of patrons to this sort of painting was clear. Poussin and Rosa had featured mountains in landscape, but never alone. Their canvases showed mythical or scriptural themes; Wilson, however, painted the lonely grandeur of mountain scenery in a neo-classical style-a sort of lofty Rousseau of art. One of his patrons protested against the loneliness of nature in his depictions: 'Remove the ruined temples, palaces, and columns; you exhibit a naked nature, which, however wild and grand, will have lost its power over the heart'.5 Farrington also noted that 'to Nature he principally referred. His admiration for Claude could not be exceeded, but he contemplated those excellent works and compared