Works by Joseph Wright of Derby
79 works · 329 ms
Joseph Wright of Derby painted candlelit scenes of science in which the light's source is often hidden from sight, and later chased moonlight, fire and rainbows across his landscapes.
Wright trained in London under Thomas Hudson, the master of Joshua Reynolds, and spent most of his life in his home town of Derby. His friend the doctor Erasmus Darwin drew him toward the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a circle of Midlands scientists and industrialists, though he never formally joined. In An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump of 1768 the lecturer stares out beside a white bird in a glass globe, while one girl hides her face and a younger one gazes up. In the orrery lecture two years earlier, the faces around the model of the planets glow from a light hidden behind a figure seen in silhouette.
Portraits and landscapes make up most of what follows, and paintings far outnumber drawings. After a visit to Salerno in 1774 he painted its sea caves in many versions, testing rock, shadow and reflections in pictures such as Cavern, near Naples. Matlock Tor by Moonlight, from 1777–80, is among his first views of his native Derbyshire, with the moon breaking through cloud above a river.
In 1793 he wrote to his friend John Leigh Philips that he was trying a rainbow, and in Landscape with a Rainbow one drops through a slate-grey sky at the right, beyond a stone bridge. The fire in Cottage on Fire, from about 1786–87, throws a hot red glare against a cooler moon in the clouds at the upper left.
Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Yale Center for British Art, National Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Derby Museum and Art Gallery.
