As a painter and tutor of international fame, Richard Wilson was an essential figure in the development of 18th-century European landscape painting.
British landscape painter Richard Wilson (1714-1782) receives a rare major exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art. “Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting”opens March 6 and will remain on display through June 1.
This investigative exhibition details the development of European landscape in the pivotal 18th century, which saw the rise of the landscape as an independent and valued genre. The show focuses on Wilson’s contributions to the landscape and to this period in art history, examining the artist’s stay in Rome, his mastery of inherited techniques, and the legacy he left to later British painters, by which he posthumously earned himself the epithet “father of British landscape painting.” Not only through his art but also through his tutelage Wilson greatly influenced landscape painting in this era, and his accomplishments are remembered in the present exhibition.
“Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting” places Wilson’s paintings and drawings in conversation with the picturesque Arcadian settings of earlier landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet, and also with examples from Wilson’s notable contemporaries Pompeo Batoni, Anton Raphael Mengs, Francesco Zuccarelli, Charles Joseph Natoire, and Joseph Vernet, among others.
After its installation at the Yale Center for British Art, the exhibition will travel to the National Museum Cardiff, where it will be on display July 5 through October 26.
To learn more, visit the Yale Center for British Art online.
