When he was a young man Wilson was an admirer of Ruskin. This meant that anything he drew of painted had to be absolutely accurate – nothing added, nothing taken away. His (often beautiful), drawings were absolutely precise. As he became older he started to follow Turner. This is not so odd as it appears; Ruskin wrote a defence of Turner in ‘Modern Painters’. Ruskin seems to have loved Turner because of what he (Ruskin) saw as Turner’s truthfulness to nature and Turner’s revolutionary distain for the conventional way in which most of Turner’s (and Ruskin’s) contemporaries painted landscapes. Turner combined imagination with his observations. He was innovative and came closer to nature than any other artist had done since Claude (who Turner greatly admired). Turner showed a new understanding and knowledge of nature and of her structure, but he also depicted her spirituality and Ruskin was the critic who understood this.
Edward Wilson chose two artistic giants to model his work on
Isobel Williams – Author, Cruise Speaker and Lecturer 