Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting, the extremely revealing exhibition, will be closing at the end of this month in Cardiff, if you haven’t been yet, it is well worth a visit! The show has offered a remarkable opportunity to re-examine Wilson’s place as a major innovator of landscape painting in a European context and to see a large body of his work in one place for the first time since 1983. We were delighted to negotiate the loan of a remarkable drawing by Wilson made in preparation for his View of Hampstead Heath, a sheet which had been in the collection of the first secretary of the Royal Academy, Francis Milner Newton. Jonny has been closely involved in the exhibition over the last couple of years, he wrote an essay in the catalogue and a number of the catalogue entries.

Wilson is a difficult artist to grasp in many ways; in market terms he suffers from the profusion of second and third rate copies made by his followers. It was only on seeing the Toledo version of the White Monk again at Yale that I understood the power and sophistication of the composition and its technical inventiveness. It is a problem which has been muddied by the scholarship. W.G. Constable’s 1953 catalogue is confusing with muddled provenances and many instances of the same painting appearing multiple times; it was a situation not helped by the 1982/3 exhibition. This powerful show, with its highly suggestive essays, added little on the attribution front; the emphasis, as the author noted, was ‘to discover what the pictures signified to their original public’ rather than to pursue: ‘the dead end of connoisseurship.’ (Quoted in Paul Spencer-Longhurst’s fascinating essay: ‘This Delightful Artist’: Cultural Trends in the Historiography of Richard Wilson, in eds. Martin Postle and Richard Wilson, Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting, exh. cat., New Haven and Cardiff, 2014, p.182.)

Standing in the galleries at Yale and Cardiff assessing what was Wilson and what was studio, what was Italian period and what was later became clearer, although I greatly look forward to the launch, later this year of the Paul Mellon Centre’s online Catalogue raisonné to clear up some of my lingering uncertainties! But questions of attribution aside, the curators, Martin Postle and Robin Simon, are to be congratulated for producing an exhibition which compellingly demonstrates Wilson’s importance as a visual innovator. It was highly revealing to see him in his visual context; the presence of works by his Danish, German and British pupils highlight his importance to European landscape painting more generally. The last section of the exhibition, which contained works by John Robert Cozens, John Constable and Turner, demonstrated his lasting influence on the conception of landscape in Britain throughout the nineteenth century.