Is Wright of Derby Britain’s Caravaggio? | National Gallery

Whether Wright of Derby anticipated this or not, these two paintings have come to encapsulate an entire period of British art culture, indeed the entire age of the Enlightenment. Born in Derby in 1734, Joseph Wright became known as Joseph Wright of Derby to tell him apart from other artists. Today he's recognised as one of the most remarkable artists of the Enlightenment. It's not just the scale and ambition and drama that they show, it's also the fact that the people shown in the paintings would have visited the exhibitions and seen themselves reflected in these very complex compositions. People would describe Wright of Derby as an artist of the Enlightenment. He is operating on a far greater, broader level than just simply the art world of mid-Georgian London. That broader level that Wright of Derby was operating on drew on inspirations from other artists and times. One of those artists was the Italian Caravaggio. Wright of Derby adopted Caravaggio's dramatic style of painting called tenebrism, which was unusual for British artists to use at the time. What really distinguishes Wright of Derby is his use of what we would call tenebrism. This is a style of painting very much associated with Caravaggio and the many, many followers of Caravaggio known as Caravaggisti. In the mid-18th century no one else is painting quite like this in British art. To alight on the style of painting associated with Caravaggio is absolutely extraordinary and we still don't know how many paintings, if any, that Wright of Derby would have seen by Caravaggio. Imagine those grand tourists coming back from Rome and Naples and describing large-scale, life-size figures with one source of light. According to his niece Hannah, Wright of Derby would have two rooms, one in darkness with objects, one in full light with the door open, and he would then examine how light played off one room to the other. That is certainly one way of representing the way that Caravaggio worked. Wright of Derby didn't just use this light and dark approach to bring drama to his paintings. It's how people in the 1700s would have experienced their evenings and nights without technologies such as electrical lighting. The relationship between light and human beings in the 18th century is very different to our experience now. Most light sources, once the sun has gone down, would be candle, lanterns, and if you're lucky, moonlight. So they would have witnessed scenes like this all the time because that's how they have to live. If you had some Georgian silver, you would see how light was reflecting off candles and candle holders. Wright of Derby has often been called a master of light. He's more recently been called a master of darkness. Frankly, you can't have one without the other. So to be honest, he's a master of both. Wright of Derby's skill in using both light and dark reveals his talent for showing how some things can be connected yet contrasting. This ability didn't just start with technique. He used it to explore ideas that were closely linked like science and philosophy. One of the paintings that shows this is a philosopher lecturing on the orrery. It shows a travelling lecturer explaining how the solar system works using a model of it called an orrery. The real advance in the creation of the orrery was in fact that it was a moving planetarium. Planetariums were known previously, but in the opening years of the 18th century, a moving model of the solar system was created for the Earl of Orrery, hence the name orrery. Wright plays off this really cleverly because firstly, it makes the object itself grander, more important, you know, sort of encapsulating the universe in the mid-18th century. It also allows the throw of light across the painting to actually cast some really interesting shadows. Across the figure at the left, for example, who's taking notes, you can see the stripes of the armillary spheres actually hitting the figure itself, which just adds to the skill of Wright of Derby in reproducing, in very, very effective terms, how the orrery throws shadow. The other thing we need to do when we're looking at the orrery is get back into the mindset of the 18th century. The orrery moves relatively slowly and sedately. It's big, it's infinite. This is why Wright selecting the kind of lecture where the sun is replaced by a lamp or a light is actually really clever, because not only is the light allowing you to see the phases of the moon and eclipses, it does allow you also, through the use of tenebrism, to suggest awe and wonder in the children in particular, who you see in the centre of the painting. They seem to be transfixed by the orrery and what the lecturer is telling them. For the adults, I think the idea of how small they are in comparison to the enormity of the solar system is probably what is causing them to pause and reflect. For the others, of course, and the gentleman on the top left there, he's simply noting down what the lecturer is saying or the kind of computations that are being made around the notion of the solar system. In the 18th century, young women were encouraged to engage with natural philosophy as an accomplishment. It does show you that women were expected to engage with all elements of knowledge, from the arts to the sciences. The tabletop of the orrery itself was often enamelled, and although the lamp that's representing the sun cannot itself be seen, the actual reflection of the light itself can be seen on the top of the orrery. Another one of Wright of Derby's most famous paintings is an experiment on a bird in the air pump. Just like the painting, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, this artwork shows a demonstration that travelling lecturers would do at the time. They were people who are famous for using live animals, birds, spiders, kittens, I'm afraid. The suffocation of the animal itself is due to the cause of the vacuum being created by the pump. This was actually quite controversial in the 18th century. Some lecturers, like James Ferguson, actually said it was inhumane to be doing this. The fact that we don't know what's going to happen does add to the drama of the painting, and the little boy on the right-hand side is literally waiting to see if the bird is going to be released and fly back into its cage. Wright could have chosen a white bird like a dove, but he didn't. He chose a very exotic rare bird, the cockatoo. There's numerous ideas that I have around this, but one might be, if we consider life to be precious, then what better way of demonstrating that than the death of a precious rare bird. It's not just the experiments that make Wright of Derby's paintings special, it's how the people watching react. Their expressions show how audiences might have responded at the time, and which types of behaviour society valued. You have so many reactions around the table as they're watching. It's almost like the whole life cycle of a human being is represented, through the children on the right, through the young adults over here, and then the middle-aged and older people around the painting itself. It is very interesting to see the children so distressed in a painting of the 1760s, and what these young girls are showing is their sensibility as young women. They're the only two who are actually distressed by what they're witnessing. This figure here is actually timing how long it's taking for the bird to die. The father figure here is obviously consoling perhaps his daughters, saying actually don't worry he's about to release the bird, all will be well. Or is he just simply indicating to the children the idea of life and death is simply what they have to accept as human beings. Wright of Derby explored death in other less direct ways in his paintings too. He also showed difficult emotions that he had personally experienced. So this is a man really transfixed by the diseased skull in the jar through which the light is glowing, and it's this area here that we found traces of silver leaf. So again it's the focus really of the painting itself. This is a traditional symbol of Memento Mori, you too will die, and he of course is closer to death than the young girls. So this is the first of Wright of Derby's candlelights that actually shows the moon. The moon interestingly has a number of connotations. It's linked to melancholy, it's a symbol of melancholy. Wright of Derby himself actually did suffer from what we would call depression but at the time was known as melancholy. It is also a time in the 1760s when melancholy was associated with creative genius. So at the centre of both these paintings are these figures of elders who dominate the scenes. In the air pump he's looking at us and pulling us in with his hand as kind of slightly raised, teasing us almost. Wright of Derby created artworks that make us feel part of the audience watching these experiments. He invites us to join him at the centre of art, science and society in the 1700s. He also reminds us of the passing of time and connections between us in sometimes unexpected ways. On the left hand side we actually have a young couple. They are in fact Thomas and Mary Coltman. They obviously know each other intimately. Given the symbolism of memento mori, the idea of young lovers becoming old lovers might be passing through their mind as two young people in love about to be married. But these two people are friends of Wright of Derby. They owned paintings actually in the exhibition created by Wright of Derby and the National Gallery actually acquired a so-called conversation piece of a portrait of the two of them which is now in the collection. Joseph Wright of Derby was a master of spectacle and mystery, creating paintings that glow with curiosity, moral tension and the drama of human experience. Even hundreds of years after his death he continues to offer his audiences new ways of seeing the world.