Joseph Wright of Derby

The city of Derby is one of England’s great railway cities. Another claim to fame is the local 18th. century artist, Joseph Wright, whose name is rarely separated from the appendage “of Derby”. The city art gallery has a fine collection of his work and when I travelled to Derby in early August to visit the celebratory exhibition for the bi-centenary of railways, I found time to fit in a long held ambition with a visit to the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Wright (1734-1797) was a successful London-trained conventional portrait painter with a well connected clientele ranging from landowning baronets to the emergent industrialist class. His enduring fame arises from his mastery of extremes of light and shadow, in the service of visual drama, something he explored in some early portraits but brought to triumphant fruition in two indisputable masterpieces in his maturity - “A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery”, (1766) and “An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump”, (1768), the former is in the Derby museum, the latter is in the National Gallery.

Wright was living in a place and time increasingly shaped by rapid developments in science and technology. A few miles to the north in Cromford, Richard Arkwright was pioneering industrial mass production in a water powered mill. Via his acquaintance with Erasmus Darwin, a Derby resident, Wright was connected with Birmingham’s Lunar Society where the great and good debated the philosophical challenges of the day. This fervid intellectual climate is where Wright found his own subjects celebrating the hunger for knowledge and the triumph of science over superstition. The Age of Enlightenment literally portrayed as light conquering darkness. Wright had followed his own impulse to make a major statement about the age he was living in, his sense of excitement at the pace of scientific advance, in painted form - reflecting a sensibility far ahead of his time.

The centrepiece of the Derby display is the Orrery painting. A small audience observes a demonstration of a device designed to illustrate the planetary orbits in the solar system. The authority figures - the ‘Natural Philosopher’ and his assistant strike poses at the top of the composition but our eyes are drawn into the centre where two small children in the full glare of the hidden candlelight do their best to comprehend. Opposite them is another observer, seen only as a dark silhouette, while three other figures complete the cast of characters. A secondary drama is the disposition of shadows cast by the orbital strips as they flicker from the sleeve of the note-taker to the cheek of the young man supporting his forehead with extended thumb and forefinger. The artist gives his full attention to every  visible surface and texture while conveying the earnest sobriety of his adult audience. The features of the children are tenderly expressed and there’s a certain charm in the slender female hand resting next to the chubbier hand of her young but portly companion.

Was there some latent snobbery at work in stressing Wright’s Derby origins?  We don’t get to hear about Joshua Reynolds of Exeter or Thomas Gainsborough of Sudbury. Wright tried his hand in Liverpool and Bath but it was his decision to return to Derby that came to signify his provincialism. Early in his career he spent more than a year in Italy, mostly in Naples where he fell under the spell of Mount Vesuvius, painting the spectacular lava flows and volcanic eruptions by night and day.  Landscape was a recurring interest, often favouring nocturnal subjects over the full light of day. Cultivating an air of respectability would have been vital for Wright’s portrait business but this might have concealed a restless intelligence that led him to identify with the spirit of intellectual enquiry that typified his times.

 

Ludgate Circus in Illustration and Postcard

This unsigned illustration comes from an Ernest Nister illustrated children’s book, The Scrapbook of Trains (c.1900). An atmospheric rendering of a busy Victorian street scene populated by some unconvincing rigid figures. When the railway bridge in these views was constructed in 1865 there was a storm of protest from the Victorian public angry at losing the view of St Paul’s up Ludgate Hill. All to enable the London, Chatham & Dover Railway to extend its services into the City of London. The line formed a link with the Metropolitan Railway near Farringdon and much later was used by Thameslink for cross-London services. Ludgate was one of the 6 gates in Roman London’s city wall. The bridge came down in 1990 when the Thameslink tunnel was completed, thus restoring the lost view of St. Paul’s after 125 years.

The King Lud pub (left) opened in 1870 and would finally close after various changes of identity in 2005 - the building remains and the ground floor is occupied by a Leon restaurant. Among a number of reminiscences on the Closed Pubs website is a recollection of a lively performance by the famous Blues piano player Champion Jack Dupree. A minority of the many postcard views have chosen to capture the scene at ground level but most opted for an aerial view from the upper floors of neighbouring buildings - a few waited for a train to pass over the bridge. Businesses come and go, advertising signs are repainted while horse drawn buses are replaced by petrol driven vehicles. An archive search of commercial and property directories might enable them to be assembled in chronological order. To nobody’s surprise, when the bridge was demolished, for every voice greeting the newly restored sightline to St. Pauls, another was deploring the loss of a ‘much loved’ bridge.

There’s a fine contemporary diatribe quoted below that John Ruskin would have been proud of.

Of all the eyesores of modern London, surely the most hideous is the Ludgate Hill Viaduct– that enormous flat iron that lies across the chest of Ludgate Hill like a bar of metal on the breast of a wretch in a torture-chamber.

Let us hope that a time will come when all designs for City improvements will be compelled to endure the scrutiny and win the approval of a committee of taste. The useful and the beautiful must not for ever be divorced. The railway bridge lies flat across the street, only eighteen feet above the roadway, and is a miracle of clumsy and stubborn ugliness, entirely spoiling the approach to one of the finest buildings in London.

The five girders of wrought iron cross the street, here only forty-two feet wide, and the span is sixty feet, in order to allow of future enlargement of the street. Absurd lattice-work, decorative brackets, bronze armorial medallions, and gas lanterns and standards, form a combination that only the unsettled and imitative art of the ruthless nineteenth century could have put together. Think of what the Egyptians in the times of the Pharaohs did with granite! and observe what we Englishmen of the present day do with iron. Observe this vulgar daubing of brown paint and barbaric gilding, and think of what the Moors did with colour in the courts of the Alhambra!

A viaduct was necessary, we allow, but such a viaduct even the architect of the National Gallery would have shuddered at. The difficulties, we however allow, were great. The London, Chatham, and Dover, eager for dividends, was bent on wedding the Metropolitan Railway near Smithfield; but how could the hands of the affianced couple be joined? If there was no viaduct, there must be a tunnel.

Now, the bank of the river being a very short distance from Smithfield, a very steep and dangerous gradient would have been required to effect the junction. Moreover, had the line been carried under Ludgate Hill, there must have been a slight detour to ease the ascent, the cost of which detour would have been enormous. The tunnel proposed would have involved the destruction of a few trifles –such, for instance, as Apothecaries' Hall, the churchyard adjoining, the Times printing office– besides doing injury to the foundations of St. Martin's Church, the Old Bailey Sessions House, and Newgate.

Moreover, no station would have been possible between the Thames and Smithfield. The puzzled inhabitants, therefore, ended in despair by giving evidence in favour of the viaduct. The stolid hammermen went to work, and the iron nightmare was set up in all its Babylonian hideousness."