John Westbrooke sees a British painter who mingled the Enlightenment and the darkly Gothic
There’s a lot going on in Joseph Wright’s “The Air Pump”, the 1768 centrepiece of the latest National Gallery exhibition, and though it’s stunning – 6ft by 8ft and full of faces – it needs a little explanation.
For a start, its full name is “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” and while its intensity makes it feel like a baroque religious painting, it’s about science.
A bird is writhing in a glass vessel. A scientist holds a valve with which he can let air back into the vessel to save the bird, or cut it off altogether and kill it. He could be a mad scientist, long lush hair and untidily robed, gazing out past the viewer perhaps at the future, and like Victor Frankenstein he’s demonstrating the awesome possibilities of scientific advances. What will he do?
Of the viewers around the pump, illuminated by a single candle, a couple are too busy staring into each other’s eyes to care. Two young men look on with interest. But two young girls fear the worst: one looks worried, the other hides her face while another man explains what’s happening, which isn’t helping. Behind everyone is darkness.
However rational we may be, we can be concerned too. After all, this isn’t really an experiment, it’s a demonstration. Air pumps were nothing new; the scientist is educating a small public on the properties of a vacuum, but the cockatoo doesn’t have to die to advance human knowledge any further, and maybe it won’t.
Yet for all its depiction of the march of science, the whole painting reads like a horror film – also recalling Frankenstein. Around the light source and the people it illuminates, the image varies from darkness to blackness. (The exception is a full moon seen through a window, perhaps a nod to the Lunar Society, an intellectual group in Birmingham.)
Artistically, this recalls the high-contrast chiaroscuro (“light and dark”) works of painters like Caravaggio, but metaphorically it’s about shedding new light on the ways of the world in the Age of Enlightenment.
In fact Wright wasn’t merely “provincial”: he did study, paint and exhibit in London, was elected to the Royal Academy but declined to take it up, and even spent a couple of years in Italy. But he would have been in touch with philosophical and scientific thinking in the Midlands too: among those associated with the Lunar Society were James Watt, Dr Johnson, Josiah Wedgwood – and Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, who acted as Wright’s doctor when he had some sort of breakdown.
Not all of Wright’s work see knowledge as turmoil. “The Orrery” features a model of the solar system – there’s a real one on display by the painting – with the planets rotating around the sun by clockwork. In this case, as the full title spells out (“A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place”), the sun is a lamp again lighting up the faces of adults and children present as it enlightens them, but this time with nothing to alarm them.
Then again, not all his candlelight paintings are purely scientific; Gothic motifs are surprisingly often lurking in the shadows. “The Blacksmith’s Shop” has the smith fixing something at night for a traveller whose carriage has broken down, lit by the forge, the white-hot metal and the moon; but far from a “shop”, it appears to be set in a ruined cathedral that could be anywhere from Derby to Transylvania – or in Bethlehem, where nativity scenes were sometimes depicted as a new dawn for mankind amid the ruins of the Roman empire.
“The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus” has him kneeling in awe at his find, in an equally dark, grand but sound building. (The search for the Philosopher’s Stone, able to turn base metal into gold, was genuine science at the time, till it was found not to exist; phosphorus had been discovered a century earlier.) “A Philosopher by Lamplight”, perhaps painted as a companion piece, seems by contrast to be set at the mouth of a cave, where another grey-haired hermit studies the bones of a skeleton, slightly spooking two young pilgrims who’ve stumbled on him in the dark. None of the joy of scientific discovery here, though, just the contemplation of mortality. Men still died, but the certainty of an afterlife was beginning to fade.
As for “Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent”, he looks like a gravedigger at night under gnarled trees and turbulent clouds, lit by a lantern (and a moon), and in a way he is: he’s stopping up foxholes so the foxes will be stuck outside and more easily killed by hunters next day. There are no little girls to fret about the animals’ fate; they’ll die for fun, not for science.
The painter was happy to be called Wright of Derby, where he was born and died (1734 – 1797); his oils translated well into black and white mezzotint prints, which could be sold in London and elsewhere without requiring his presence. He was selling, too, to the Midlands men growing rich from the Industrial Revolution – as well as to the Russian Empress Catherine the Great, who bought several paintings for the Hermitage museum she’d recently founded.
In the long run, though, the epithet may be the reason he’s not widely thought of as in the same league as artists of the south-east like Reynolds and Gainsborough in his own time, or Turner and Constable later. This exhibition is an eye opener. It will travel to Derby in 2026.
Wright of Derby: From the Shadows is at the National Gallery until 10 May 2026. Tickets from £12; concessions available.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/wright-of-derby-from-the-shadows
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