‘Wright of Derby: From the Shadows’

But interest largely stopped in the mid-19th century; later British art, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, held little appeal. By the end of the 19th century much of the Gallery’s British art was displayed in the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) to preserve space for the main draw, European Old Masters.Then, in 1897, Sir Henry Tate endowed a new ‘National Gallery of British Art’ on Millbank. Most of Trafalgar Square’s British paintings were eventually transferred there, including Hogarth’s Painter and his Pug and almost the whole of the Turner Bequest. The Times had supported the new gallery, saying ‘we ought to have a collection to which we could take our French neighbours and our American cousins, to show them that the art of Great Britain is a flourishing reality’. But Wright’s Air Pump was not included as an example of the best of British; it was sent to Derby Museum on long-term loan between 1912 and 1947. Even as late as 1958, an exhibition of Wright’s work at the Tate Gallery described him as a minor, ‘provincial’ painter.Still, the creation of the Tate Gallery further highlighted the National Gallery’s British problem. Although some of the ‘best’ British pictures, such as Turner’s Fighting Téméraire, were retained by the National Gallery, any visit to Trafalgar Square appeared to suggest that British art magically materialised in the 18th century and then just as magically disappeared after about 1850. Wright’s Air Pump was belatedly included in the National Gallery’s ‘greats’ after it was reclaimed from the Tate in 1986.

The National Gallery’s interest in historic British art remained sporadic. Between 2000 and 2024 only two major exhibitions focused on British art and, tellingly, both were designed to have international appeal: ‘Stubbs and the Horse’ (2005), which began at the Kimbell in Texas, and ‘Turner Inspired’ (2012), which centred on that artist’s debt to Claude Lorrain. It is no coincidence that in the same period the National Gallery’s visitors came predominantly from overseas, peaking at over two thirds of visitors in 2019. This was an era when a museum’s success was counted in visitor numbers. It didn’t much matter where they came from.

The situation changed abruptly after 2020. Brexit and Covid sharply reduced overseas tourism, and the National Gallery found it needed to appeal again to domestic audiences. Exhibitions on British art have returned to the Gallery’s programme. Last year brought ‘Discover Constable & the Hay Wain’. Next year we will have another show on Stubbs. And this year we have ‘Joseph Wright of Derby. From the Shadows’. It is the National Gallery’s first exhibition devoted to Wright.

The exhibition focuses on Wright’s candle-light pictures painted between about 1765 and 1773, and seeks to ‘foreground’ them, as it says in the catalogue, as ‘outstanding examples of European painting’. Of the 10 oils by Wright, five are from Derby Museum, where the exhibition will travel in 2026. The display opens with two compelling pairings. First, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (exhibited 1765) is hung beside An Academy by Lamplight (exhibited 1769) (Pl 2, Pl 3).

 

 

 

2 Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, 1765. Oil on canvas, 102.5 x 122 cm.
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Photo RS

 

 

 

3 An Academy by Lamplight, 1769. Oil on canvas, 127 × 101 cm.
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

 

 

In the Gladiator we see Wright himself with his friend and fellow-artist, Peter Perez Burdett. They are showing their drawing of the back of a cast of the Borghese Gladiator to a third man, perhaps a drawing instructor, who carefully compares their drawing to the Gladiator as seen from behind. An Academy repeats the conceit, but on a larger scale and with younger male artists admiring the Borghese’s Nymph with a Shell. Both paintings are said to underline how important it was for British artists to study classical statuary in the 18th century (although I personally suspect Wright and Burdett were also poking fun at the idea).

A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a lamp is put in place of the sun (exhibited 1766) (Pl 4) is reunited here with the Air Pump (exhibited 1768) for the first time since Judy Egerton’s magnificent 1990 Wright exhibition at the Tate.

 

 

4 A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a lamp is put in place of the sun, 1766.
Oil on canvas, 147.3 x 203.2 cm. Derby Museum and Art Gallery

 

 

 

4a Grand Orrery, by George Adams, between 1752 and 1757. Ht 92 cm.
Bayerisches National Museum

4b Detailed view of the Grand Orrery in Pl 4a

 

 

In an inspired touch by curators Christine Riding and Jon King, these two pictures are accompanied by an actual orrery and air pump from the period (see Pl 1a, Pl 4a, Pl 4b). Like the people in the paintings, we can imagine ourselves listening to a demonstration of how the solar system worked – some of us excited, some lost in thought, some distracted – and we can hear the clanking of an air pump as it takes air out of the glass chamber, suffocating the poor bird within it. The label for The Air Pump draws our attention to the two young girls who ‘cling to each other in distress’, while their pet bird suffers. The catalogue tells us ‘we will never know’ if the philosopher opens the valve in time to let the bird live, because the painting is about ‘the moral and ethical implications of looking’.

A final pairing comes with A Girl reading Letter, with an Old Man reading over her shoulder (c1767–7) and Two Boys Fighting over a Bladder (c1767–70), while the last four paintings show Wright’s increasing command of the candle-light genre across varied scales and settings. A Philosopher by Lamplight (exhibited 1769) shows a solitary thinker in a grotto, and is probably a witty nod to the exiled Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had been grumpily ensconced in Richard Davenport’s grotto at Wootton Hall near Derby a few years earlier. The Alchymist (exhibited 1771) is eerily gothic in both atmosphere and architecture. A Blacksmith’s Shop (1771, the second version of the subject) (Pl 5), shows three smiths labouring within a nativity-like setting.

 

 

5 The Blacksmith’s Shop, 1771. Oil on canvas, 125.7 x 99 cm.
Derby Museum and Art Gallery (1979-598)

 

 

An Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent (1773) takes Wright’s nocturnal gaze outdoors, where moonlight and lamplight compete, although we detect from the sheer application of paint that Wright was more absorbed by the rocky precipice than the earthstopper himself.

If you are a Wright fan, ‘From the Shadows’ will leave you wanting more. One addition that would have complemented the show is the Tate’s An Iron Forge (1772). It shows a more modern scene than A Blacksmith’s Shop, with the labour of hand-hammering replaced by a water-driven tilt-hammer. Indeed, Wright may have conceived An Iron Forge as a kind of sequel to A Blacksmith’s Shop, if the boy whose eye is injured by sparks in the first version of A Blacksmith’s Shop (Pl 5a) is the man who appears in An Iron Forge (Pl 6) with a headdress quite obviously covering one eye.

 

 

5a The Blacksmith’s Shop, 1771. Oil on canvas, 128.3 x 104.1 cm.
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.712

 

 

 

6 An Iron Forge by Richard Earlom after Wright of Derby, 1773. Mezzotint.
Derby Museum and Art Gallery (1921-818/2)

 

 

Fortunately, An Iron Forge is at least represented in the display of 11 mezzotints of Wright’s work. Together, the paintings and mezzotints present an artist who, even before his departure for Italy in 1773, had revealed himself as one of Britain’s most original talents. Walk from the exhibition into the National Gallery’s other rooms, and it seems clear that ‘From the Shadows’ has succeeded in positioning Wright’s early works as ‘outstanding examples of European painting’. The mystery is why this should ever have been in doubt.

I am less clear about the interpretation of Wright’s pictures that ‘From the Shadows’ offers. Given the emphasis on light and shadow, the exhibition is naturally keen to tie Wright to one of European art’s blockbuster names, Caravaggio. Indeed, the catalogue asks if Wright was ‘Britain’s Caravaggio’, and presents his motive for painting candlelight pictures as a conscious ‘adoption of a 17th-century Continental tradition that originated in Rome and Naples’. Wright is seen as obediently falling in line with the Italianate tastes of Britain’s art collecting, Grand-Touring, élite. It is a traditionally National Gallery view of this crucial phase in the development of British art.

There are two problems with this way of seeing Wright. First, the temptation in art history to tie one artist to their presumed predecessors (especially Italian ones) can often feel laboured, and here it does. Wright’s alleged Caravaggism had multiple sources, and it is not clear that in mid-18th-century Britain Caravaggio was even considered worth emulating. There was a more generic interest in what we have come to call tenebrism, via Dutch artists such as Gottfried Schalcken or simply the chromatic contrast of a print. And it is easy to forget that Wright lived in a candle- and lamplit-age, where tenebrism was a nightly occurrence.

Secondly, British art in the 18th century developed from a number of different attitudes to European art. Certainly, most artists embraced the Italian ‘grand style’. Joshua Reynolds made sure to embed it in almost every aspect of the new Royal Academy’s ethos. Other artists, however, went to Italy with a more sceptical eye. George Stubbs went chiefly to satisfy himself, as he told Ozias Humphrey, ‘that nature was & always is superior to art whether Greek or Roman’. Among those who refused to go to Italy was William Hogarth, who was fonder of France, and was the standard bearer for British artists determined to prove they could beat the Europeans at their own game. I would place Wright more towards the Stubbsian view of Italy. When there, he spent more time admiring Italy’s volcanoes, caves and fireworks than its art. At least ‘From the Shadows’ acknowledges that, whatever his inspiration, Wright came ‘to his own conclusions through extensive observations and experiments’.

Unfortunately, Wright is misunderstood a number of times in the catalogue. One feels that rather than embrace the exhibition as a chance to look again at the paintings and their evidence, and come up with something new to say about them, the curators decided it would be safer to adhere to art-historical orthodoxy. This is ironic, since the catalogue insists that Wright’s pictures are about ‘the act of looking itself’. The result is to undermine the very originality of Wright that the exhibition ostensibly sets out to promote. In one sense, such a conservative approach is understandable. Much of art history, especially British art history, has become a discipline of convention. We can leave the reasons for this for another day, but it results in a preference for recycling opinion over empirical enquiry. This was evident in the catalogue for ‘Discover Constable & the Hay Wain’, which revolved around theories of the ‘contested landscape’ first developed over 40 years ago, and it is evident too in the catalogue for ‘From the Shadows’.

I will explore here two examples of where Wright is, in my view, misunderstood. First, the role of ‘the sublime’ in Wright’s paintings. Like much scholarship on British art in the 18th century, ‘From the Shadows’ sees ‘the sublime’ as almost entirely deriving from the writing of the Conservative politician and writer Edmund Burke. In pictures like The Air Pump, Wright may have been emboldened (says the catalogue) by George Stubbs’s ‘dramatisation of the Burkean sublime’ in paintings such as Horse devoured by a Lion, 1763. It is true that Burke wrote a book in 1757 called A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which went through many editions. But read the whole book and it is clear Burke thinks his kind of sublimity has little application to painting, an artform he viewed with some disdain. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in recent art history, there is in fact no contemporary evidence that Burke’s writing on the sublime was embraced by Stubbs or Wright, or indeed many artists at all. The kind of sublimity artists most referenced came from writers and poets whose work pre-dated Burke’s Enquiry, men such as John Dennis, Joseph Addison and James Thomson. These writers were chiefly interested in ideas of the religious sublime, which, in turn, drew on longer established ideas of sublimity going back to the ancient Greek writer known as Longinus. It is this tradition of sublimity that accounts for some of the subject-matter in Wright’s candle-lit pictures.

Secondly, ‘From the Shadows’ repeats the assertion that Wright’s early paintings were heavily influenced by the Irish artist Thomas Frye (1710–1762). Shortly before he died, Frye published a series of mezzotints of character heads that were advertised as being based on drawings by the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682–1754). ‘From the Shadows’ claims that Wright relied on Frye’s character heads for the composition of ‘the entire cast’ of The Air Pump, that is, all 10 figures. The Piazzetta/Frye/Wright link thus fits a narrative of 18th-century British art being dependent on Italy for its ultimate inspirations.

An exhibition which avers that Wright came ‘to his own conclusions through extensive observations and experiments’ might have been a good opportunity to challenge such a narrative. Let us therefore test the Frye thesis here.

There is no contemporary record of Wright having met or regarded Frye. Wright’s debt to Frye was first claimed by Benedict Nicolson in his catalogue of Wright’s work in 1968. Nicolson, finding himself unable to account for the ‘speed of [Wright’s] progress’^[1] as an artist in the 1760s, decided on the basis of some (often slight) similarities between Frye’s heads and Wright’s heads that Frye’s mezzotints must have provided Wright with a career-defining eureka moment.^[2] These included the figure of the philosopher in The Air Pump, who Nicolson said was based on Frye’s Figure with a Candle / Young man with a candle (Pl 7). Nicolson also pointed to the fact that Frye’s pupil William Pether (1738–1821) later became Wright’s mezzotint engraver.

 

 

7 Young man with a candle by Thomas Frye (1710–1762), 1760.
Mezzotint, 47.2 × 35.1 cm. Art Institute of Chicago

 

 

In 1972, Nicolson’s argument was endorsed in an article on Frye in The Burlington Magazine by the Irish art historian Michael Wynne.^[3] Then, in 1975, the Frye/Wright relationship was apparently confirmed by the emergence on the art market of three previously unknown and unattributed pastels. One of these pastels (now in the Yale Center for British Art, Pl 8)^[4] clearly shows the same sitter as the pensive man in profile who is seen on the right in The Air Pump.

 

 

8 Man leaning on a staff, ascribed to Thomas Frye, c1761.
Black and white chalk or pastel, 40 x 32.5 cm.
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, inv. B2007.1.
Inscribed on the verso ‘Mr Tate to Mr Benson’

 

 

Another is also a head of a man leaning on a staff (now in a private collection), while the third is a young girl holding a kitten (Pl 9), which is similar to Wright’s treatments of the same subject.

 

 

 

9 Girl with a cat, ascribed to Thomas Frye.
Pastel on paper, 42 x 54.2 cm. British Museum

 

 

This last work was acquired by the British Museum^[5] and, in article for the British Museum Journal in 1977, Michael Wynne attributed all three pastels to Frye.^[6] Frye’s influence on Wright has been accepted in the Wright literature ever since.

I believe the attribution of these pastels needs revisiting, and that the Wright/Frye thesis is flawed. Let me state briefly why. Prior to the publication of the three key pastels by Michael Wynne (who in fact owned the pastel shown here as Pl 8), Frye’s name had not been attached to them. Indeed, Wynne conceded they were ‘quite unlike any of the pastels or chalk drawings by Frye which have been discovered so far’.^[7] Moreover, on the back of the head of the man shown in Pl 8 is an inscription: ‘Mr Tate to Mr Benson’. Wynne noted this, but did not realise these were the names of two figures in Wright’s circle in Liverpool in the late 1760s (where Wright lived when he painted a number of the paintings shown in ‘From the Shadows’). In Liverpool, Wright boarded with Richard Tate, a merchant, amateur artist and member of the Liverpool Society of Arts. Wright also taught Richard Tate’s brother William, and his son, Thomas Moss Tate. A portrait identified as showing Thomas Moss Tate shows him holding a sheaf of drawings by Wright.^[8] ‘Mr Benson’ is probably John Benson, who married Martha Tate, another of Richard Tate’s siblings.^[9]

Now Wright made a significant number of pastel studies during his time in Liverpool. Richard, William and Thomas Moss Tate are recorded to have made or exhibited their own pastel copies of Wright’s work.^[10] Indeed, the very same inscription – ‘Mr Tate to Mr Benson’ – appears on a pastel copy after Wright (of a girl in a turban, Sotheby’s New York, 26 January 2022, lot 42, now private collection) attributed to Thomas Moss Tate and now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.^[11] This pastel shares the same provenance^[12] as another pastel, also in the Fitzwilliam Museum, catalogued as by Wright himself (Pl 10).

 

 

 

10 Head of a young girl. Black and white chalk on paper, 54.3 x 40.8 cm.
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, PD.128-1991

 

 

Finally, the pastel of a man leaning on a staff attributed by Wynne to Frye in 1977 (Pl 11) bears a strong similarity to one of Wright’s portraits of Erasmus Darwin, and may show Darwin in a more casual moment. All of the ‘Frye’ pastels discovered in 1975, therefore, are much more likely to be copies after Wright by one or more members of the Tate family.

 

 

 

11 Man leaning on a staff, ascribed to Thomas Frye, c1761.
Pastel on paper, 43.2 x 30.8 cm.  Private collection

 

 

Why does this matter? First, because we ought to recognise that Wright was skilled enough to invent his own figures and expressions, especially for major exhibited paintings like The Air Pump. Art in Britain had been dominated by portraiture since the Reformation, and by the mid-18th century Britain was beginning to produce some of the best figurative painters in Europe. Wright was one of them (a gallery that did not present British art as magically emerging in the 18th century might not be surprised by this). But above all it matters because Wright’s candle-light paintings only reveal their true meaning if we properly understand how they were created. If Wright was not following Caravaggio artistically, Edmund Burke philosophically, or Thomas Frye compositionally, then different interpretations of his paintings are available to us.

Let me end by looking at just one work exhibited in ‘From the Shadows’, the National Gallery’s own Air Pump, and see how our interpretation of it might change. If, for example, all the characters are not borrowed from Thomas Frye, then we can believe more convincingly that Wright is inviting us to witness a real demonstration of an experiment that actually took place. The early Wright literature tells us that the characters in Wright’s candle-lit paintings were often based on people Wright knew. The most important of these was his friend and fellow artist Peter Perez Burdett, an energetic and mischievous man interested in astronomy, Pythagorean theory and deism. He appears in The Gladiator and The Orrery, and collaborated with Wright on the compositions of at least two paintings – The Alchymist and The Captive – and he also made aquatints of Wright’s early works. Burdett is also seen in The Air Pump, at the far left, exchanging a glance with a young woman (‘From the Shadows’ states this is Thomas Coltman gazing at his future wife, Mary, but I agree with Matthew Craske and Stephen Leach that it looks far more like Burdett). It is likely, therefore, that the ‘Caravaggist’ lighting we see in pictures such as The Air Pump has a philosophical function, derived from Wright’s discussion with friends like Burdett, just as much it might have an aesthetic significance.

The poses and expressions of the other figures in The Air Pump are intended to guide us to the picture’s ultimate conclusion and purpose. The pensive old man is not cut and pasted from a Frye pastel, but someone who is consciously not paying attention to the experiment. He is lost in another world of reflection, and we too are invited to reflect. The young boy looking excitedly upwards at the glass chamber does not do so because he is a recycled Frye mezzotint (in fact the same model also appears in The Blacksmith’s Shop) but because he has noticed something worthy of exclamation. We too should notice it.

What has he noticed? Nothing less than the painting’s dramatic conclusion. The bird will live. The philosopher, who has conducted this experiment before, gestures with one hand to the man timing the experiment, while opening the valve with the other. We can be sure of this from the mezzotint, published in 1769, which preserves certain details less visible in the painting today (Pl 12). Beneath the valve in the mezzotint we see a jet of air coming into the chamber, or rather spray from the water used to keep the air pump’s seals moist (Pl 12a).

 

 

 

 

12 An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Valentine Green after Wright of Derby, 1769. Mezzotint.
Derby Museum and Art Gallery (1912-475/2)

 

12a Detail of mezzotint in Pl 10, showing air entering the chamber as the valve is opened

 

 

The moment of tension has therefore passed. Peter Burdett and his female friend exchange a glance of relief. The father of the two girls gestures towards the bird in order to assure them that everything will be all right. The younger of the two girls dares to look up to see if it is really true.

The Air Pump, therefore, is less about ‘the moral and ethical implications of looking’ – dressed in Burkean sublimity – and more about capturing a moment of drama on canvas in a way nobody had ever done before. Wright has taken us to a moment of profound tension on the question of life itself – who makes it and who controls it – with unparalleled originality and skill. Like all good story tellers, he gives us just enough to know there is a happy ending. In this enjoyable show, the National Gallery finally brings one of Britain’s greatest artists out of the shadows, even if they can’t quite see what he was trying to illuminate.