| Joseph Wright (1734–1797), known as “Wright of Derby,” ranks among the finest painters of Britain's golden age. Equally adept at portraits, landscapes, and history subjects, he is best remembered for his remarkable depictions of artificial light. This study re-examines Wright's candlelight paintings, seeking to regain the meanings they embodied for their earliest viewers.; It begins by situating Wright's work within the broad history of tenebrist painting, with particular attention to seventeenth-century Dutch ‘fine-painters’ such Gerrit Dou and Godfried Schalcken, and to mid-eighteenth century British night painters such as Henry Robert Morland and James H. Bunck. It relates the period's taste for dramatic chiaroscuro in the fine arts to the popularity of spectacle in other aspects of the visual culture—from the ‘Eidophusikon’ to transparency paintings to public illuminations. Next, it re-examines Wright's celebrated painting of the Orrery, discrediting its supposed representation of a real historical event with recognizable figures surrounding an actual astronomical machine. It re-presents this iconic image of Enlightenment science as a thoughtful meditation on the nature of art cleverly constructed from printed sources, and directed to a large public audience. Similarly, it questions the traditional identification of Wright's Hermit as Democritus. Instead, it proposes a deliberately evocative, polysemic narrative structure—one that draws meaning from the contemporary vogue for hermits and hermitages, and that manifests Wright's evolving conception of the modern subject painting. It concludes with a new analysis of Wright's candlelights from 1768 to 1773, a vital period of innovation and change, when the artist altered his handling, composition, and techniques of painting, and prepared many of his most accomplished genre scenes. In addition to his arresting depictions of women reading letters and children occupied with bladders and with cats, Wright's celebrated views of iron forges and blacksmiths' shops, as well as his earliest landscapes, are considered here. Finally, an appendix provides the hitherto-unknown contents of Wright's library, as they appear to have descended to his widowed son-in-law, Graham Chappell, by 1834. |
