\u2022 Read more art reviews, guides and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place, 1764-1766<\/p>\n DERBY MUSEUMS<\/p>\n There will be other paintings \u2014 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\u2019s astonishing facility as a draughtsman \u2014 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<\/a>, says the exhibition\u2019s curator Christine Riding.<\/p>\n Self-portrait in a Black Feathered Hat, c 1767-70<\/p>\n DERBY MUSEUMS<\/p>\n A Girl Reading a Letter with an Old Man Reading Over her Shoulder, c 1767-70<\/p>\n PRIVATE COLLECTION\/OMNIA ART<\/p>\n 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\u2019s three-storey townhouse. <\/p>\n The cat escaped the bag, eventually, and on inspecting his work, his father was so taken aback by his son\u2019s obvious talent that he found him an apprenticeship in London with Thomas Hudson, one of the era\u2019s most popular portraitists. At almost \u00a380 a year, it was, Riding says, \u201ca mega investment\u201d, but perhaps the highly successful Hudson represented a safe, potentially lucrative model for his son to follow.<\/p>\n 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, \u201cBritish artists were thought technically and intellectually incapable of emulating\u201d. Even among contemporary artists, continental painters such as Canaletto, Vernet and Pompeo Batoni, for example, were much more the thing.<\/p>\n \u2022 Five Great British landscapes that inspired famous artists<\/a><\/p>\n But the 1760s were also \u201ca turning point in the creation and public display of contemporary art\u201d, Riding points out in the exhibition catalogue, \u201cwith the growth of a dynamic exhibition culture alongside an already buoyant print market\u201d. 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He found this in his own milieu \u2014 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. <\/p>\n 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 \u2014 the sharing of knowledge, \u201cin the clubs, the coffee houses, annual exhibitions, public lectures\u201d, Riding says. Scenes like The Air Pump, The Orrery and The Gladiator all depict \u201cforums through which knowledge can be disseminated\u201d.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s answer was to look to an artist considered not just unfashionable but more or less beyond the pale for his vulgarity \u2014 Caravaggio.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the 18th century,\u201d Riding says, \u201cCaravaggio was thought to be sort of lewd and debased \u2014 prostitutes as the Virgin Mary, that kind of thing.\u201d But what he lacked in finesse, casting-wise, he certainly made up for in drama. <\/p>\n From Caravaggio, Wright picked up on tenebrism, which had few practitioners in the UK. \u201cTenebrism 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,\u201d Riding says. \u201cIt creates its own sense of emotion, drama and tension without the painter really doing anything else.\u201d Add to this Wright\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n The candlelight pictures probably wouldn\u2019t have had the same impact were it not for their sensitivity and their engagement with big ideas popular at the time. \u201cThe gothic sensibility was well in train by the time we get to Wright of Derby,\u201d Riding says. \u201cAnd from the 17th century onwards, melancholy was progressively identified with artistic genius.\u201d <\/p>\n Wright leaned heavily into the concept of melancholy in his work from this period, incorporating the traditionally melancholic motif of the moon (it\u2019s 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\u2019s flame). Wright deliberately explored \u201cthe night-time, to engage with deeper and more sombre themes, including death, melancholy, morality, scepticism and the sublime\u201d, Riding says. The darkness is as important as the light. <\/p>\n An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768<\/p>\n THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 check; moonlight filtering through clouds \u2014 check). <\/p>\n![\"Oil](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\/d7a99aa4-4cb4-4006-b709-2538642014dc.jpg\")
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