More thoughts on ‘Wright of Derby: From the Shadows’

Several of the earlier works exhibited, Three Persons viewing the Gladiators by Candlelight, A girl reading a letter with an Old Man reading over her shoulder, and The boys fighting over a bladder, show Wright choosing subjects in which he could showcase his skill in chiaroscuro imagery. These are accompanied by the melancholic Philosopher by Lamplight, An Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent and An Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone. These are beautifully worked, thought-provoking, meditative paintings, but the exhibition highlights are to be found in the spectacular A Philosopher giving the Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in the Place of the Sun, exhibited in 1766 when Wright was thirty-two, and An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, where we see Wright tapping into the growing interest in natural philosophy and responding to scientific topics that were being discussed widely at that time. And then in the painting A Blacksmith’s Shop, 1771, and the mezzotint of an Iron Forge viewed from without, 1773, one of a series of this subject, we see Wright choosing subjects that reflect on the dignity of labour, revealing, perhaps, the change that was affecting his own life at that time, his attachment to Hannah Swift.Orreries demonstrating the movement of the planets were used in demonstrations by lecturers on astronomy from the early 1700s and would not have been something new to Wright. His painting of 1766 comes at a time when there was a heightened interest in the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This was a rare event. The transit of 1761, and that predicted for 1769, were the first for more than 100 years and would not be seen for a further hundred. The importance of observing the transit of Venus was its value in determining the distance of the earth from the sun by recording the time that the planet Venus, which would be seen as a black dot, would take to cross the face of the sun. The event may have inspired Peter Perez Burdett, a friend of Wright and of the 5th Earl Ferrers, who bought Wright’s painting, to commission it.^[1] The curators have brought to the exhibition a very fine model, The Grand Orrery, c1750, attributed to Benjamin Cole, and similar to the one in Wright’s painting. Wright’s title A Philosopher giving the Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in the Place of the Sun, however, suggests that the orrery, with a lamp in place of a solid sphere, would not only have appealed to Wright for the effect it produced but, in this form, could also have been used to demonstrate the passage of Venus across the face of the sun.Itinerant lecturers became popular in the 18th century and their success illustrates the appetite that existed in Britain for rational explanations of the world that science appeared to provide. Between 1742 and 1792 eighteen different itinerant lecturers visited the West Midlands, the centre of the early Industrial Revolution.^[2] Among them we find Benjamin Martin (1704–1782) and James Ferguson (1710–1776). As early as 1743 Martin was prefacing his course of lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy, Geography, and Astronomy with his maxim ‘Knowledge is now become a fashionable thing and philosophy is the science “à la mode”’. His lecture series included demonstrations using apparatus designed by Martin himself and covered astronomy, pneumatics, optics, hydraulics, electricity and magnetism. His lecture on pneumatics would no doubt have included discussion of the air pump, which was often a feature of scientific demonstrations. In 1766 Martin published his Description and use of a new portable table air pump and condensing engine; with a select variety of capital experiments.

The lecture tours of James Ferguson FRS, who was based in London and himself a popular author and a designer of orreries, could last up to six months or more, with visits throughout the Midlands, including Wright’s home town of Derby, where he would have met Wright and members of the Lunar Society. Lunar Society members were well known to Wright, and he painted many of their portraits. Orreries and Air Pumps were subjects with which all would have been familiar: they were the common currency of lecture tours. In the exhibition, we see Wright seizing on these themes for two spectacular works, themes which other artists did not even consider as appropriate subject-matter. Here he presents paintings that reflect on contemporary scientific issues and in which he elevates the subject-matter into scenes of wonder, social interaction, intellectual challenge and drama.

Wright painted two versions of A Blacksmith’s Shop. Of the second version, the one in the exhibition, Wright wrote to his sister Nancy, ‘[I] have worked very hard have finished my Smith Shop: ’tis as good or better than the last.’^[3] Why would Wright think this?

In the first version, now in the Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, Wright shows two boys shielding themselves from the heat and sparks that come from the smithies working at the anvil while an old man sits in the corner holding a smithy’s hammer (see Pl 5a in Bendor Grosvenor’s review).^[4] In the version in the exhibition (Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Pl 5 in Grosvenor review), the boys have been replaced by two girls and a young boy. The older girl in the dark area of the painting can be found to be holding a large jug in her left hand (here Pl 1), there to serve the old man who is holding a tankard, suggesting that this corner is where, in retirement, he now spends much of his time.

1 Detail of A Blacksmith’s Shop by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771.
Derby Museum and Art Gallery (see Bendor Grosvenor review, Pl 5).
Note girl in green holding a jug in her left hand

The group of children now connects the blacksmith’s family. The elder sister, her right arm raised holding up her apron to shield the group from the heat and holding the jug, has a role to perform in the workshop. In this version, Wright’s painting of the blacksmith’s shop now begins to speak of the continuity of the blacksmith’s trade. Three generations are represented in the painting and the enduring tradition of the trade is reflected in the setting. Is this the reason why Wright believed it ‘as good or better than the last’? The Blacksmith’s Shop paintings were certainly admired. They are recorded by Wright in his ‘Account Book’ under a list of a dozen of his sold ‘candle light’ pictures. Lord Melbourne bought the first for £150 and Robert Alexander the second for £157. Among other paintings sold by Wright during this period, his two Iron Forge paintings, of 1772 and 1773, were sold to Lord Palmerston and the Empress of Russia.^[5]

Wright was living in Derby between 1765 and October 1773 before he and Hannah, his newly-wed wife, went abroad for two years to live in Italy. But while he was based in Derby during these eight years he spent a total of about 25 months, between October 1768 and September 1771, living and working in Liverpool. While Wright was in Liverpool he painted more than two dozen portraits of local merchants and dignitaries, many of whose businesses were supported through profits from slavery and the slave trade. These sitters include the elderly Richard Gildart (1768), ship-owner and merchant dependent on sugar plantations in the West Indies; Thomas Staniforth (1769), who took over and expanded the family ship-owning business engaged in the African slave trade; and Mrs John Ashton (c1769), wife of John Ashton, a merchant with dealings in the salt industry and the slave trade, which was a subject of considerable controversy at the time.^[6] This was a period of undoubted success for Wright as a painter but it was also one of change.

Wright, the son and grandson of attorneys at law and from the established middle class, was already a successful artist when he met Hannah Swift, the 24-year-old daughter of a lead-miner, described by his brother’s daughter, Hannah Wright, as ‘a person in an inferior situation of life’.^[7] They were married in July 1773 and soon set off for Italy. Wright kept the marriage secret from his family for three months. His parents were dead, but Wright’s marriage to Hannah clearly caused distress to his close family. In a letter to his brother Richard, written just as he and Hannah were about to sail for Italy, he breaks the news and writes:

… give me leave to send the joint love of me & my Dear Wife to you and Sister – And if I have done anything that wore the face of slight and Disaffection, say not, love was banished, but Fear stood foremost and prevented my actions.^[8]

Is it possible that Wright’s marriage to a miner’s daughter, the rupture with his close family, and the dealings with the Liverpool merchants connected with the slave trade, significantly affected his attitude to the prosperous classes and turned his thoughts to the virtues of the artisan, the labourer and the servant classes? For this period coincides with his expressing, in his Blacksmith’s Shop and the Iron Forge paintings of 1771–73, an evolving sympathy for persons whom he, the son of an attorney, might have seen as ‘in an inferior situation of life’. As Jane Wallis wonders, ‘Could his [Wright’s] growing attachment to Hannah [Swift] account for his portrayal of working men with such dignity, and their families with such tenderness, in this series of paintings?’^[9]