In the fourteenth of Reynolds's Discourses, Richard Wilson 's treatment of the Niobe theme is criticised as follows:
His landskips... were in reality too near common nature to admit supernatural objects. In consequence of this mistake, in a very admirable picture of a storm,... many figures are introduced in the fore-ground, some in apparent distress, and some struck dead, as a spectator would naturally suppose, by the lightening; had not the painter, injudiciously (as I think) rather chosen that their death should be imputed to a little Apollo, who appears in the sky, with his bent bow, and that those figures should be considered as the children of Niobe. ( Reynolds, Discourses, p. 255)