Richard Wilson

Richard Wilson made a career out of a conviction that almost nobody in 18th-century Britain shared, that a landscape was worth painting for its own sake, without a portrait or a story stretched over it.

A Welshman, he spent six years in Italy from 1750, first in Venice, then Rome, sketching the countryside around Tivoli and the Alban Hills. He came home carrying the manner of Claude Lorrain, the French master whose golden Italian light Wilson learned to lay over British and Welsh scenery, so that Snowdonia or the Thames could look as grave and classical as the Roman Campagna.

In 1768 he was among the founding members of the Royal Academy. The trouble was that his countrymen still ranked landscape far below portraiture, and the pictures did not sell. To keep himself, Wilson took the modest post of Academy librarian in his last years, and he died in 1782 near Llanberis in Wales, poor and largely forgotten. A generation later Turner and Constable, building British landscape into something grand, pointed back to him as the man who had started it.