Wilson's painting American Horizon, was on display at the 2025 Inaugural Luncheon[1] While talented and pioneering in mixing realism with abstract, Jane was prefigured by Leonard Nelson, a protege of Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, and Leader of The Philadelphia School of Art.

She was the first of two girls born to Wayne Wilson, a civil engineer, and Cleone Margaret Marquis, a teacher, novelist and poet.

Of her undergraduate experience, Wilson said: "The head of the art department, Lester Longman, would travel to New York, select, and bring back whole exhibitions for our benefit, with painting ranging from the majestic expressionist Max Beckmann to the upstart, Jackson Pollock.

Another time, Dr. Longman borrowed a hundred paintings from the Metropolitan Museum, hung them all over the art department for us to study and live with.

Among the artists were Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher, and among the poets were James Schuyler, John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara.

Of this period, Wilson said: "In 1956 and 7, I found myself in one of those lucid moments that occurs every twenty years and I realized I wasn't a second generation Abstract Expressionist.

[10] Wilson's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

"[13] Elisabeth Sussman has commented on the position of Jane Wilson's paintings in the present day: "What I find so remarkable about confronting Jane Wilson's paintings in the twenty-first century is how elegaic they look and how they simultaneously recall the poetic sensibilities of mid-century, when the syntax was kept simple, when everyday renditions of land and sky or of ordinary life could be at once benevolent and metaphysical--simple situations redolent of the vagaries and complexities of the day-to-day.

"[15] Of her early work, Stuart Preston wrote: "[Jane Wilson] is a hedonist in paint, employing a plethora of strokes and bright colors that sometimes fall into still-lifes and figures but usually do not.

"[16] Speaking of Wilson's work from the early 1950s, Dore Ashton wrote: "[She] is a young painter enchanted by the majesty of light.

She is so expert, so deft, so assured, that one fears from one exhibition to the next that her hand will take over and we will get that automatic, habitual flair with all the surface manifestations of vivacious sparkle and dulcet flow that are meaningless when the controlling sensitivity has grown careless or has been exhausted.

Part of the delight (“delightful” is another partially suspect adjective) of Miss Wilson’s painting is that in each picture she seems to have touched just that balance between delicacy and assurance..."[19] In 1984 critic Michael Brenson wrote in The New York Times: "The human world seems to be holding its breath through different stages of a continuing, sometimes heated debate among earth, water and sky.

From the dark troubled ones to those whose pale gradients make them impossible to photograph, the array is overwhelmingly various as the work of one painter treating a single subject.

And yet in all its abundance it might be seen as comprising one vast work, just as in its single, austere dedication it is expressive of the most unbridled extravagance, and in its primal nature it is endlessly renewable, eternally now.

Together, Jane Wilson and the sky have made an encyclopedia of moods and textures and marks and palettes, delineating the immense multiple personality we collectively name weather.