Joseph Wright of Derby was the first English painter to take his themes from science, and his titles were as precise as his details. The picture below, exhibited in 1766, was called A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a Lamp is put in the Place of the Sun. The orrery was a popular wighteenth-century device for representing the movement of the planets in the solar system. Wright was endlessly fascinated with the problems of light, as this painting shows, but his preoccupation was as much scientific as artistic. This devotion to science naturally recommended him to Josiah Wedgwood, who became his lifelong friend and often drew on him for pottery designs and models.
—Joseph Wright of Derby, “A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun” (1766)—Joseph Wright was one of the most important English painters of the eighteenth century. He linked elements of romanticism with powerful images of science and technology. His depictions of artificial light on the faces of experimenters and their audiences captured the sense of wonder attendant on discoveries in natural science. He painted many famous painting, the most famous one depicting a bird in an airpump.—Read More:http://www.dalefield.com/mwes/orrery/orrerypaintpg.html
( See link at end)…Sparks flew when the world’s largest collection of paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby was cleaned – along with wind-blown spray flashing in sunlight, flames shooting from mountain tops and tiny figures suddenly revealed skulking in inky shadows.
The conservation work on the paintings, before the reopening this weekend of the gallery in his native city dedicated to his work, astonished Lucy Salt, keeper of fine art at the city museum, who thought she knew every inch of the paintings, and suddenly saw details invisible for more than a century re-emerge.
Wright remains a bit of a mystery to her. He was born in 1734 a few hundred yards from the museum, a town clerk’s son who taught himself to draw by copying prints. Although he went on to study in London, and exhibited at the Royal Academy until he fell out with them because he thought they undervalued his work and chipped his frames, and travelled in mainland Europe where he saw Vesuvius erupting, an experience recalled in scores of his paintings, he spent nearly his entire life in Derby and died in a house almost within sight of his birthplace.
Nothing in his life explains the drama and passion in his work which made him famous – although he knew many scientists, inventors and philosophers, and watched the scientific experiments shown in many of his best-known works, including the spellbound group watching a demonstration of an orrery.
“There’s a really wild streak in Wright. He was very intelligent, and had a very wide circle of extremely interesting and intellectual friends, but he was obviously quite a difficult man, nervous, ill, anxious, increasingly reluctant to leave his house. And yet the paintings don’t reflect that at all,” says Salt.Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/23/restoration-joseph-wright-derby-paintings
—The Blacksmith’s Shop (Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771). Wright described this painting as “Two men forming a bar of iron into a horse shoe, from whence the light must proceed.”1 To achieve the dramatic effect desired, Wright created a scene of a traveler who had an accident, therefore requiring the candlelight repairs. This was the first in a series of five blacksmith’s shops and iron forge paintings by Wright. Photo courtesy of the Derby Museum and Gallery.—Read More:http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/0706/byko-0706.html
The fascination with light and its effects must have had an influence on the work of Turner; one can see the influence of Rembrandt in Wright’s work, albeit there is not an absence but a different complexity of he narrative that takes Willaim Hogarth to a whole new level; the nightmare and potential of this collision between revelation and science, both complementary and antagonistic…
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