As his name suggests, Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) remained true to his origins. While other Georgian artists shed their provincial status – we don’t talk of Joshua Reynolds of Plympton, Thomas Gainsborough of Sudbury or George Stubbs of Liverpool – Wright remained a Midlander. He had stints in London, Bath and Italy but found the subjects, the intellectual stimulus and the patrons he needed closer to home.
Wright is usually described as a pre-eminent artist of the British Enlightenment, whose pictures, especially his nocturnes showing experiments with an air pump and an orrery, depict the moment the natural sciences encroached upon the role of religion in both private and national life. In this he was helped by his location: Derby and its environs were profoundly shaped by the Industrial Revolution (the city was the site of the first modern factory in the country, John Lombe’s water-powered silk mill, which was completed in 1721), and home to a new industrialist-entrepreneurial class. Wright was a friend and patient of Erasmus Darwin and, through him, was adopted by the Lunar Society of Birmingham – James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Richard Arkwright, Matthew Boulton et al.
This characterisation suggests that Wright was a proselytiser for modernity and herald of a rapidly changing Britain. The new exhibition of some 20 of his works at the National Gallery, “Wright of Derby: From the Shadows”, suggests, however, a far less straightforward painter. He was indeed an artist of a very particular historical moment, but that moment was a knotty one.
The show focuses on the candlelit scenes Wright painted between 1765 and 1773 that made his reputation. At its heart are his two most celebrated works, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1766) and An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), as well as his first foray into the genre, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765). Each shows the spirit of enquiry of the age and the dissemination of knowledge as art and science are discussed and explained – comprehension emerging from the darkness of ignorance.
A contemporary commentator described Wright as “a very great and uncommon genius in a peculiar way” and that peculiar way was to co-opt the old artistic form of the nocturne for his scenes of scientific observation. From Taddeo Gaddi in the 14th century, through Adam Elsheimer and Godfried Schalcken in the 17th century, painters understood that darkness, by default, brought mystery and intimacy, while Caravaggio proved that it could inject drama too. In mood, however, Wright’s night scenes are closer to the paintings of Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), the French painter who used candlelight to infuse his pictures, sacred or profane, with a profound spirituality. For Wright, an enveloping darkness was the setting for contemplation.
It is notable that even in the Air Pump and the Orrery, few of the gathered onlookers attend to the words of the philosopher as he explains what is happening. Most are lost in their own thoughts – two young girls stricken at the fate of the bird in the air pump as it begins to gasp for breath, a pair of lovers who look at one another rather than the experiment, a young man and woman who recognise in the model of the moving planets their own insignificance.
Wright did not need to invent such scenes, “natural philosophers” – part scientists, part moral instructors – would put on such demonstrations in town halls and private homes across the country, introducing empirical thinking to lay audiences. Nevertheless, however wondrous theses contraptions may be, they are not the latest technology.
Mechanical or clockwork representations of the planets go back to the ancient Greeks – the “Antikythera mechanism” showing the motions of the sun, moon and five planets dates from 205 to 87 BCE – and the first modern version was invented by the clockmaker George Graham circa 1700, more than half a century before Wright painted his picture. Meanwhile, Robert Boyle invented an air pump in 1659, and in his New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall described an experiment almost identical to that shown by Wright: “… the Bird for a while appear’d lively enough; but upon a greater Exsuction of the Air, she began manifestly to droop and appear sick, and very soon after was taken with… violent and irregular Convulsions.” Wright substituted an exotic grey cockateel for Boyle’s lark, probably because its plumage showed up better in a dark painting.
If Wright were depicting a type of modernity then he was also showing its origins. And this engagement with the past is evident in his other nocturnes too. Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight depicts two art students (one of them being Wright himself) and their teacher studying a model of the Hellenistic statue known as the Borghese Gladiator; A Philosopher by Lamplight (circa 1769) has two startled nighttime wanderers coming across a hermit pondering a skeleton, in a setting that is more English parkland than desert; The Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone (1795) harks back to the early days of experimental science (Isaac Newton was an alchemist and his features are sometimes associated with those of the philosopher in the Air Pump); and even The Blacksmith’s Shop (1771) is sited in the ruins of a classical building, with fluted pilasters in the background.
So there is a mix of other contemporary themes at work in his pictures. The contrast between light and darkness can be read as a symbol of enlightenment but alternatively as a prompt to meditations on mortality and melancholy. Meanwhile, the frisson given by the night touches on the nature of the sublime (Edmund Burke’s influential aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in 1757 and characterised the sublime as inducing awe and terror) and the new gothic literature (Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the first novel in the genre, was published in 1764).
With the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, this was also the time at which the academic hierarchies of art were set, with history painting at the top. Wright’s pictures fall outside the established categories – they mix genre scenes, conversation pieces, fancy pictures, all with immaculate passages of still life – even if the Air Pump, for example, was painted at a size usually reserved for the grandest of subjects from history, literature or the Bible. Wright further asserted his independence by painting without a commission, trusting that his circle of friends and admirers would buy his work. The boy drawing aside the curtain in the Air Pump to reveal the moon outside is an elegant nod to just such supporters in the Lunar Society. He advertised his abilities through prints of his works, many in mezzotint, a technique ideally suited to his nocturnes.
Wright was an accomplished portraitist and landscapist too, dramatising the natural world with the light effects he had mastered – moonlight, rainbows or, during his Italian travels, fireworks over the Castel Sant’Angelo or Vesuvius erupting into a night sky. In the decades that followed, romantic painters would use such motifs to convey their own inner depths, Wright, however, a man who could be awkward in the company of strangers, seemed intent on stirring feelings in others rather than expressing his own.
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear