Ruskin 's appreciation of Wilson gradually increased. In Modern Painters III he noted that Turner grew up in 'contemplation of Reynolds, Loutherbourg, Wilson, Morland, and Wilkie' ( Works, 5.408). He owned a sketch by the artist, No 276 in the Ruskin Art Collection, and he describes Wilson as a 'thoroughly great painter' ( Works, 21.288). In his discussion of the Oxford Rudimenary Series he describes himself as 'compared with Richard Wilson, I am a mere baby in artistic faculty ( Works, 21.289). He assessed Wilson's work in different way at different times. In some passages from the manuscript of the intended continuation of The Laws of Fesole he observed that:
I had for some time in my rooms at Oxford a little water-colour drawing which I had bought at a modern exhibition, for the sake of its own great truth in representing colour in shadow against afternoon sunlight. This was done wonderfully in each case for a large number of separate objects; but it was not done harmoniously over the whole picture. I had by chance placed beside it a light pencil sketch of a sunset on the tower of Cecilia Metalla by Richard Wilson, in which there was no effort at complete effect on any one object, but everything was absolutely harmonious in the degree of its incompletion. I never looked at the Wilson without feeling myself warm, and in Rome; but when I looked at the other drawing, I only felt myself in the water-colour exhibition, and was obliged at last to put it away. ( Works, 15.500)
In the Two Paths (1859) he noted that: 'among those who labour no more, in this England of ours, since it first had a school, we have had only five real painters,- Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Richard Wilson, and Turner' ( Works, 16.414). In the Art of England (1883) he observed, 'with the name of Richard Wilson, the history of sincere landscape art, founded on a meditative love of Nature, begins in England: and, I may add, for Europe... With Richard Wilson, at all events, our own true and modest schools began ( Works, 33.378).