10 DECEMBER 1948, Page 17

THE RICHARD WILSON EXHIBITION

SIR,—Owing to an unfortunate misprint on page 7 of the catalogue of the Richard Wilson Exhibition at Birmingham, there is perhaps some cause for your art critic's confusion over the identity of Thomas Wright, though knowledge would have allayed his fears. There were in fact two Thomas Wrights ; the one, a minor portrait painter of the first half of the eighteenth century, to whom Wilson was apprenticed when he first came to London at the age of sixteen ; the other, a posthumous imitator of Wilson's style, and also his biographer, who was active in the first half of the nineteenth century. And may I add that in describing the big Llanberis Lake at Tooth's Gallery as a larger version of the landscape by which Wilson is represented in the Louvre, Mr. Middleton is also mistaken ? For this design exists in a number of versions, many of them falsely attributed. The picture at Tooth's, which- has been acquired by the Felton Bequest, is the finest known version ; the picture in the Louvre is not by Wilson at all.—I am, Sir, yours faithfully, DOUGLAS COOPER.

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