Wilson has been called “a painter’s painter,” and various testimonies show how deeply impressed later distinguished artists were by his work. Sir James D. Linton[619] points out that “Turner carried Wilson’s methods so far in some of the works of his early middle period as almost to amount to imitation,” and notes a picture by Turner of “Kilgarrin Castle” “so like Wilson in manner, treatment, and colour that it might fairly be called a ‘Wilson Turner.’” Constable, also, though he did not choose the grand themes, and though he rejected the classical mannerisms of Wilson, was yet one of his great admirers. Of a visit to the gallery of Sir John Leicester in 1823 he wrote, “I recollect nothing so much as a large, solemn, bright, warm, fresh landscape by Wilson, which still swims in my brain like a delicious dream. Poor Wilson! think of his fate, think of his magnificence.”[620] Of Wilson’s place in the development of art Ruskin says, “I believe that with the name of Richard Wilson the history of sincere landscape art, founded on a meditative love of nature, begins with England.” [Illustration: A WELSH VALLEY WITH SNOWDON HILL _By Richard Wilson_] Thomas Gainsborough, though mainly known as a portrait painter, showed an early and persistent bent toward landscape. Before he was twelve it was his delight to spend his mornings in the woods near his home at Sudbury in Suffolk, sketching from streams, trees, cattle, sheep, and peasants. In 1741, at fourteen years of age, he went to London and studied, first under Gravelot, then under Hayman, and finally set up a studio of his own. His ostensible work was portraits for which he charged from three to five guineas, but he likewise painted landscapes for such prices as they would bring. From 1745 to 1759 he was again in Suffolk, but this time at Ipswich, twenty-two miles east from his old home at Sudbury, and in the region between the Orwell and the Stour, the region afterward made famous by Constable. During the Ipswich period he was slowly building up a reputation as a portrait painter; but here, too, he made “Madam Nature, not man, his sole study.” He did much sketching along the picturesque banks of the Orwell and in the groves of oaks and elms in the neighborhood of Ipswich. That he painted many landscapes while at Ipswich is indicated by the fact that Governor Thicknesse called upon him in 1754,[621] and was much struck by the great beauty of the small landscapes mingled with the rather stiff portraits in the artist’s studio. None of these landscapes can now be identified, but it was their excellence that gained from Governor a commission to paint “Landguard Fort,” important as the earliest known of Gainsborough’s landscapes, though, even in this case, the original picture has perished and is known only through Thomas Major’s engraving. To the latter part of the Ipswich period belong the “Cornard Wood,” “View of Dedham” and two small uprights in the National Gallery,