1774-1855

Part of a generation of artists influenced by John Constable, who eschewed prescriptive formulaic painting in favor of personal response, John Wilson painted inspired scenes of traditional English countryside.  His was “a natural incorrupt vision of landscape . . . a guileless sincerity and dogged faithfulness in establishing an unmediated rapport with nature . . . the Wordsworthian recurrence of a familiar landscape over a temporal span of one’s life,” as scholar Stephen Eisenman points out.  Wilson’s light tends to be clear and refracted by water, his colors transparent and his subject lushly detailed, viewing the bounty of nature with complete lucidity.