Richard Wilson: Landscape painting for a new Exhibition Culture

Richard Wilson (1714 – 1782) was considered by his contemporaries ‘ingenious’ and by his followers as ‘the father of British landscape painting’. Painting in Italy and afterwards in Britain, Wilson was arguably the foremost British landscape painter of the eighteenth century. He painted in a classical style shaped by the works of masters such as Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet and Nicholas Poussin and gained inspiration from his travels and classical literature. His life spanned much of a century which saw an enormous shift in the British art world with the onset of the annual public exhibition. This dissertation will consider Wilson’s submissions to the Society of Artists’ annual exhibitions between 1760 and 1768. I will argue that Wilson pursued a highly deliberate strategy of self-advertisement when choosing pieces to submit to these public exhibitions and consider the extent to which Wilson used the venue of the public exhibition to change public perceptions of landscape painting as a genre.