"Long known as the father of British landscape painting, Richard Wilson (1714–1782) was at the heart of a profound conceptual shift in European landscape art. This magnificently illustrated volume not only situates Wilson’s art at the beginning of a native tradition that led to John Constable and J. M. W. Turner but compellingly argues that, in Rome during the 1750s, Wilson was part of an international group of artists who reshaped the art of Europe. Rooted in the work of great seventeenth-century masters such as Claude Lorrain but responding to the early stirrings of neoclassicism, Wilson forged a highly original landscape vision that, through the example of his own works and the tutelage of his pupils in Rome and later in London, established itself throughout northern Europe."--