Wilson’s work as a landscape painter began certainly as early as 1750 in Italy, and all probabilities are in favor of the supposition that it began earlier in England. To be sure, no juvenile sketches, no anecdotes of youthful tendencies, remain to substantiate this conjecture. Even the “View of Dover,” the one landscape known to have been painted before the Italian visit, is no longer in existence. But the fact that this picture was at once engraved by J. S. Miller would seem to indicate that it was counted a work of some importance. Furthermore, when Wilson began his work in Italy there was no apprentice period. Work done in the early years there shows a management of landscape detail and composition quite equal to that of his later work, and such as would not be prepared for by the most zealous study in portraiture. It is, indeed, hardly believable that a pronounced passion for landscape such as characterized Wilson should never have tempted his brush till he was thirty-six, and should then, at the chance words of a fellow-artist suddenly open out before him as his life-work. Edwards Edwardes is responsible for the anecdote that attributes Wilson’s change from portraiture to landscape to the advice of Zucarelli. But we have, on the other hand, the more probable account given by Mr. Hastings in a volume of etchings made by him from the Ford collection of Wilson’s paintings. Mr. Hastings gives Mr. R----s (probably Mr. Samuel Rogers, the author of “Italy” and an art connoisseur) as authority for the statement that an influential patron of the arts, Mr. William Lock of Norbury, perceived Wilson’s bent toward landscape of the grand sort, and urged him to go to Italy as the best place to perfect himself in that art. Mr. Beaumont Fletcher, Wilson’s latest biographer, considers that the artist was fully conscious of his powers as a landscape painter, and that his visit to Rome was premeditated for the purpose of study in that particular line.[608] Sir Walter Armstrong also maintains the probability, almost certainty, of landscape work by Wilson prior to the Italian tour.[609]