Baths of Caracalla at Albano

Harper arrived in Rome in 1752 as Wilson’s first known pupil, and, like Wilson, he had trained as a portrait painter but decided to change to landscape. This sketch demonstrates a key aspect of Wilson’s teaching method, whereby his pupils would copy his drawings, in this case an unfinished study made on the spot. Harper’s drawing is a remarkably close copy of Wilson’s original even to the detail of the barely indicated rider on a horse in the foreground, and is identical in technique. Nonetheless, the style is very different, Harper’s being markedly more linear and precise in comparison with Wilson’s, whose control of tone and texture creates a more atmospherically suggestive image.