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.
