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Description
The White Monk by Richard Wilson is a picture of seminal importance in the history of eighteenth-century European art; one of a number of major works in which Wilson combined the traditions of the historical Grand Manner landscape painting, established a century earlier by Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet, with direct observation from nature. Wilson’s approach in The White Monk, and successive compositions of this kind, had a transformative effect on his own art, and upon successive generations of landscape painters, anticipating and influencing the revolution wrought by Turner and Constable in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Read full essay by Martin Postle