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24/10/09 - 23/12/09
Richard Wilson - Life and Legacy
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‘Richard Wilson Life and Legacy’
24th October – 23rd December 2009
The father of English Landscape Painting or the Greatest Painter that Wales had ever Produced?
Richard Wilson was a major Welsh artist who fundamentally changed attitudes to the Welsh landscape.
Today, most people take for granted the idea that the natural landscape is beautiful. However, before the middle of the eighteenth century, natural landscapes, and especially mountainous landscapes such as those of north Wales, were regarded as unpleasant wastelands. The influence of creative artists - poets and painters, changed all that and the Welsh painter Richard Wilson (1713-1768), played a fundamental role in stimulating this change.
Wilson’s reputation as a major landscape painter in London and Rome was established by 1760, and it enabled him to make his own country fashionable as a subject. After his death, his pictures drew the young J.M.W. Turner to Wales for five visits before 1800, and it was here that he laid the foundation of his career. It is as a result of his influence on Turner and other nineteenth century English painters that Wilson became known as ‘the father of English landscape painting’.
Opportunities to see a substantial group of pictures by Wilson are rare. The last major exhibition of his works was at the Tate Gallery in London in 1982. In October 2009 the Royal Cambrian Academy will address this neglect by presenting to the public the largest group of pictures by Wilson seen since then. The catalogue will trace the rise and fall of his reputation, and in particular the different ways in which his work has been interpreted in Wales and in England. Clearly, Wilson’s Victorian reputation as ‘the father of English landscape painting’ inspired mixed feelings among his own people, who wished to place him on a wider stage as the greatest painter that Wales had ever produced.
Admission prices: £5 or £3 for conessions
Consessions: Students, Senior Citizens and Friends of the RCA
Free to children under 12 years old!
Admission to the lower gallery of 'Astonishing Art and Creative Craft' is free.