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Additional notes:
This is not a modern print. This impression is more than 165 years old. The strike is crisp and the lines are sharp. The original oil paint on canvas is part of the Tate Collection.
Extra Information:
Hadrian's Villa is one of two small companion pictures featuring scenes around Tivoli, the other being Maecenas' Villa. The present picture has also been titled View in Italy with an arched ruin and Strada Nomentana, owing to the similarity of the ruin to one which appears in another picture by Wilson, also belonging to Tate. However, if the present picture does feature Hadrian's Villa, near Tivoli, there can be no link with the Strada Nomentana, which runs to the north-east of Rome, and in a quite different direction. The present picture is closely based upon a small, on-the-spot, chalk drawing made by Wilson made during his time in Rome, around 1752-3, and now in the collection of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and Museum, Swansea. Wilson was attracted to Tivoli during his years in Italy not only because of its classical associations but also as the sketching-ground of several great seventeenth-century artists, notably Gaspard Dughet (1615-75). Even so, the relatively simple composition of the present picture, concentrating upon the ruin in the foreground at the expense of a broader vista, does not adopt the customary format of seventeenth-century classical landscapes that Wilson reserved for his larger, more ambitious, canvases. Hadrian's Villa is not a mere topographical vignette, Wilson's picture being 'a variation on one of his favourite themes - that of "sic transit gloria", a statement concerning the tragic collapse of a once mighty Empire'. Wilson appears to have quite deliberately focussed upon the ruins of the villa in order to contrast its venerable history with its current state of dilapidation, it having been used by the local population as the foundation for a humble cottage dwelling. The rickety wooden fence above the arch strewn with washing highlights this point. Versions of Hadrian's Villa and Maecenas' Villa, Tivoli may have been the same pictures exhibited by Wilson at the Society of Artists as 'A small landscape with a ruin'and 'Ditto; its companion'. Certainly, there is no doubt that these little pictures were very popular because Wilson repeated them over and again during the early to mid 1760s. Other artists, including John Constable (1776-1837) also copied them. 
Artist Biography: Richard Wilson RA 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. A catalogue raisonné of the artist's work is published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. The son of a clergyman, Richard Wilson was born on 1 August 1714, in the village of Penegoes in Montgomeryshire (now Powys). The family was an established one, and Wilson was first cousin to Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden. In 1729 he went to London, where he began as a portrait painter, under the apprenticeship of an obscure artist, Thomas Wright. Wilson could often be found walking around Marylebone Gardens with his acquaintance Baretti heading toward the Farthing Pie House, now known as the Green Man Public House. From 1750 to 1757 Wilson was in Italy, and became a landscape painter on the advice of Francesco Zuccarelli. Painting in Italy and afterwords in Britain, he was the first major British painter to concentrate on landscape. He composed well, but saw and rendered only the general effects of nature, thereby creating a personal, ideal style influenced by Claude Lorrain and the Dutch landscape tradition. John Ruskin wrote that Wilson "paints in a manly way, and occasionally reaches exquisite tones of colour". He concentrated on painting idealized Italianate landscapes and landscapes based upon classical literature, but when his painting, The Destruction of the Children of Niobe (c.1759–60), won acclaim, he gained many commissions from landowners seeking classical portrayals of their estates. Among Wilson's pupils was the painter Thomas Jones. His landscapes were acknowledged as an influence by Constable, John Crome and Turner. Wilson died in Colomendy, Denbighshire on 15 May 1782, and is buried in the grounds of St Mary's Church, Mold, Flintshire.

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