Diana and Callisto

The subject of this painting is taken from Roman literature. In Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', Callisto, one of Diana's nymphs, was seduced by Jupiter. The painting shows the moment when Diana confronts the pregnant nymph. Richard Wilson was the first British-born artist to make a full-time career as a landscape painter and this is one of a set of four classical landscapes painted for Henry Blundell of Ince Hall, Lancashire; the others remain at the Hall.Much of the preliminary work on these large canvases was painted by Wilson's apprentices. All depict scenery based on the countryside around Rome where Wilson had spent nearly five years in the 1750s. He returned to England as a landscape painter in the tradition of the great seventeenth-century masters Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet. However, the ruinous round tower, although so familiar in Italian landscapes, is actually Dolbadarn Castle, seen as it stands on its crag at the foot of Snowdon in North Wales.