ART
LONDONERS should say thank-you to Birmingham for the Richard Wilson exhibition, which has now arrived at the Tate but lightly depleted. In Wilson, the classical and romantic overlap to such an extent that the terms become even more suspect than usual without redefinition. Notwithstanding those uneasy essays in mythology to which Ruskin and Reynolds took exception, the classicism Wilson learned in Italy was in its essentials formal ; it was based, that is to say, not so much upon allusions to the antique as upon a con- sidered disposition of his material so as to produce an ordered poise. In an age of reason he searched for an absolute structure beneath appearances. Yet, hand in hand with his intellectual, selective approach, and quite inseparably from it, went an elegiac contempla- tion of nature which equally represents the romanticism of the eighteenth century. Wilson borrowed the deep perspectives and the affecting light and tonality of the Venetians, the delicacy of Claude, the veiled and dusty atmosphere of Gaspard Poussin, to which he added the golden light of Cuyp and the homely, tangled mysteries of Ruysdael. The tenderness of his response to nature looks back to Giorgione and forward to Constable and Turner. His Entrance to a Wood points the way to Samuel Palmer. The Fallen Tree is forerunner to Sutherland's Sprawling Treetrunk and Nash's Monster Field. From the afterglow of the Campagna and the majesty of the Welsh mountains he distilled something which touched his contemporaries at a multitude of points, yet duplicated none of them. He was the first English landscapist, and it served him ill.
Before his Italian trip, if, as one assumes, the views of Dover Castle predate his departure for Venice and Rome, he was as English as, say, Wilson Steer. After his return, in spite of his pot- boiling lapses, in spite of the uncouth rusticity of some canvases painted under the influence of the Dutchmen he admired and a certain naivety in some others, it was Wilson who brought a new and aristocratic finesse to bear upon the English preoccupation with and love of nature. His evenly-lit and almost shadowless groups flit through their age as typically as Hillyarde's figures did in another, and as delicately. But because these unhurried, unforced records of a poetic sensibility were neither Dutch nor Italian, Wilson, as we all know, suffered an almost complete lack of patronage, and had to console himself with porter. A catalogue of 1814, a century after his birth, hoped " that the exertion of such talents may never again remain unrewarded during the lifetime of him who may possess them," and thought that " the merits of Wilson's works is now justly appreciated." It may be questioned whether we yet appreciate them fully.
Of especial interest are the drawings belonging to the Earl of Dart- mouth which prompted the exhibition. Among the works of Wilson's " circle " to be noted are three Canalettos from H.M. the King's collection, Claude's ever-enchanting Enchanted Castle, and as welcome representatives of their period, a John Inigo Richards and
two entirely delightful George Lamberts. M. H. MIDDLETON.
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