Vintage 1960 Wilson "On Hounslow Heath" Landscape Art Print

A vintage reproduction of Wilson's On Hounslow Heath from a Metropolitan Seminars in Art volume.

12.5" x 9.5" unframed

Richard Wilson (1714-1782) was an influential Welsh landscape painter, who worked in Britain and Italy. With George Lambert he is recognized as a pioneer in British art of landscape for its own sake and was described in the Welsh Academy Encyclopedia of Wales as the "most distinguished painter Wales has ever produced and the first to appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of his country". In December 1768 Wilson became one of the founder-members of the Royal Academy. 

This piece is an extensive landscape with a market woman in a red dress seated on a bank in the left foreground, her back to the viewer and a basket by her side. Beyond is a river, on the near bank of which two donkeys are grazing. Upstream are a weir and a thickly-wooded island.

The view, looking east, shows part of the watermeadows beside the River Crane near Whitton Place, an estate on Hounslow Heath acquired in 1765 by Wilson's friend, the architect Sir William Chambers.

The site is undistinguished, not more than a piece of common nature, and treated in the unpretentious manner of seventeenth-century Dutch art. The attraction lies in the beauty of the sky and the reflections in the water and bears witness to an increasing naturalism which came to characterise Wilson's later British views, both in terms of subject matter and also in the manner of describing detail and the outdoor phenomena of light and enveloping atmosphere.