Note 606 — Chapter VI · LANDSCAPE PAINTING

There is in the National Portrait Gallery, one of the more important of Wilson’s portraits before his Italian visit, entitled, “The Two Princes and their Tutor,” a stiff, formal, but not uninteresting picture. The most admirable portrait by Wilson, that of the artist Mortimer, deserves the high praise it has won from competent critics, and shows what Wilson could do with a congenial subject and after the enfranchisement of his art by his work as a landscape painter. Except for a portrait of himself this portrait of Mortimer is the only one done by him after his return from Italy. It came into the possession of Mr. John Britton who, in 1842, wrote a pamphlet about it and the paintings and merits of Wilson in general (Cunningham’s “British Painters,” I, 153). The portrait of Mortimer is now in the Gibson Gallery of the Royal Academy, London. Reproduced in Beaumont Fletcher’s “Richard Wilson.”