Joseph Wright of Derby’s 1768 masterpiece An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, in the National Gallery collection, is, on one level, a horrible picture. Lit by a single candle, which burns behind a large, fluid-filled goblet containing a diseased human skull, it shows a lecturer pumping the air out of a glass vessel in which a white cockatoo panics and struggles to breathe. A clustered audience, including several children, looks on — or away — in various states of interest or distress.
But what a painting! Full of drama and complex emotion, exploring morality in the quest for knowledge, and the fragility of life, it is the largest, most ambitious and most theatrical of Wright’s remarkable candlelight pictures, made between 1765 and 1773.
That series of works is the focus of a forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery, in which, for the first time in 35 years, The Air Pump will be brought together with the 1766 canvas A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, from Derby Museums, and Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight from 1765, on loan from a private collection. Early next year the exhibition will travel to the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, home to 17 of the 20 works on display, bringing The Air Pump back to its home town for the first time since the 1940s.
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A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place, 1764-1766
DERBY MUSEUMS
There will be other paintings — works on paper, such as a breathtaking monochrome pastel Self-portrait in a Black Feathered Hat from about the same time as The Air Pump, which shows Wright’s astonishing facility as a draughtsman — and objects that explore his artistic practice and the historic context of scientific and artistic development in which they were made. But it was the candlelight paintings that established his international reputation, says the exhibition’s curator Christine Riding.
Self-portrait in a Black Feathered Hat, c 1767-70
DERBY MUSEUMS
A Girl Reading a Letter with an Old Man Reading Over her Shoulder, c 1767-70
PRIVATE COLLECTION/OMNIA ART
Born in Derby in 1734 to John Wright, a prominent local attorney, and his wife Hannah Brookes, Wright was not expected to become an artist, a pastime disapproved of by his father. The boy evidently had other ideas, practising his drawing in secret, copying book illustrations and prints or memorising street signs and later committing them to paper in the attic of the family’s three-storey townhouse.
The cat escaped the bag, eventually, and on inspecting his work, his father was so taken aback by his son’s obvious talent that he found him an apprenticeship in London with Thomas Hudson, one of the era’s most popular portraitists. At almost £80 a year, it was, Riding says, “a mega investment”, but perhaps the highly successful Hudson represented a safe, potentially lucrative model for his son to follow.
Still, British painters were at a disadvantage when Wright was starting out. State patronage was at nothing like the level of continental Europe, and the popularity of the Grand Tour among the aristocracy fed the market for work by Italian Renaissance masters, baroque artists, and 17th-century French classicists such as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. It set a standard that, according to Riding, “British artists were thought technically and intellectually incapable of emulating”. Even among contemporary artists, continental painters such as Canaletto, Vernet and Pompeo Batoni, for example, were much more the thing.
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But the 1760s were also “a turning point in the creation and public display of contemporary art”, Riding points out in the exhibition catalogue, “with the growth of a dynamic exhibition culture alongside an already buoyant print market”. That meant that although there were more opportunities to show their work (there were already a number of competing societies established to champion artists before the Royal Academy of Arts was set up in 1768), more were jostling for attention. What Wright needed was an eye-catching USP to help him stand out; a signature style.
He went about it in quite a calculating way. Portraiture was the most lucrative genre, but the academies still championed history painting as the highest art form (despite the fact that few people were buying it). Wright knew that, to be accepted for the most prestigious exhibitions, he had somehow to emulate the grandeur of history painting, while finding a subject that might appeal to buyers.
He found this in his own milieu — among friends and associates, such as Peter Perez Burdett, a cartographer and draughtsman who modelled for Wright on numerous occasions, the painter John Hamilton Mortimer, the medical doctor Erasmus Darwin and the men of the Lunar Society of Birmingham.
This was the Enlightenment; the age not of discovery (that was earlier, in the scientific revolution of the 16th and early 17th centuries) but of dissemination — the sharing of knowledge, “in the clubs, the coffee houses, annual exhibitions, public lectures”, Riding says. Scenes like The Air Pump, The Orrery and The Gladiator all depict “forums through which knowledge can be disseminated”.
But how to elevate this to the level of history painting, more commonly associated with depictions of great classical figures and events from antiquity? Wright’s answer was to look to an artist considered not just unfashionable but more or less beyond the pale for his vulgarity — Caravaggio.
“In the 18th century,” Riding says, “Caravaggio was thought to be sort of lewd and debased — prostitutes as the Virgin Mary, that kind of thing.” But what he lacked in finesse, casting-wise, he certainly made up for in drama.
From Caravaggio, Wright picked up on tenebrism, which had few practitioners in the UK. “Tenebrism is an extreme form of chiaroscuro, and it tends to swing around a single light source in the painting, which produces very dramatic light and shade,” Riding says. “It creates its own sense of emotion, drama and tension without the painter really doing anything else.” Add to this Wright’s skill at portraiture, so vividly on display in The Air Pump, with its mooning lovers, its appalled young girl, its fascinated boy, and you get something that really stands out on the wall.
The candlelight pictures probably wouldn’t have had the same impact were it not for their sensitivity and their engagement with big ideas popular at the time. “The gothic sensibility was well in train by the time we get to Wright of Derby,” Riding says. “And from the 17th century onwards, melancholy was progressively identified with artistic genius.”
Wright leaned heavily into the concept of melancholy in his work from this period, incorporating the traditionally melancholic motif of the moon (it’s on the right of The Air Pump, peeking through the clouds outside the window), and figures in moody contemplation (again in The Air Pump, an older man sits lost in thought, gazing not at the bird, but at the skull; a younger man does likewise in The Orrery, transfixed by the candle’s flame). Wright deliberately explored “the night-time, to engage with deeper and more sombre themes, including death, melancholy, morality, scepticism and the sublime”, Riding says. The darkness is as important as the light.
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768
THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
The works were a hit. One painting that cannot come to the exhibition is Iron Forge Viewed from Without, painted in 1773, which became the first English painting to enter the Hermitage in St Petersburg when it was bought by Catherine the Great (man leaning thoughtfully on stick — check; moonlight filtering through clouds — check).
He later shifted his focus to landscape, after spending time in Italy following his marriage to Ann Swift (she was the daughter of a lead miner; his father did not approve, so the couple eloped), but the candlelight pictures remain Wright’s calling card.
“It’s become symbolic of an entire period,” Riding says. “Wright of Derby was playing with that, but really what he was doing, which other artists like Hogarth did, was to take up a subject that wouldn’t come across as something that was going to yield a piece of high art, and using the Old Master tradition, a sense of grandeur and ambition, to transform an everyday event into something that has a moral or historical power.” And in a room full of them, maybe another generation will be inspired and enlightened.
Wright of Derby: From the Shadows is at the National Gallery, London, from November 7 to May 10, 2026; nationalgallery.org.uk