WRIGHT, Joseph

A master of subtle chiaroscuro, Joseph Wright of Derby is one of the most important of the late eighteenth-century artists who define the British Romantic movement. Painted in 1780, and exhibited at the Royal Academy that year, this painting is one of a distinguished group of works inspired by the artist’s travels in Italy, and demonstrates the profound impact which that experience had on his art.

In the autumn 1774 Wright travelled to Naples and the area around the gulf of Salerno, a popular destination for the cognoscenti of his generation, and over the course of more than a month visited Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Museum at Naples, as well as Virgil’s tomb and the coastal grottos for which that region is famed. This picture is evolved from a chalk drawing Wright made on the spot in the Gulf of Salerno, one of two studiously observed and minutely detailed sketches of particular caverns which clearly captured the artist’s imagination.

The painting shows a grotto in the Gulf of Salerno, with the figure of Julia, banished from Rome. Three errant Julias were banished from Rome during classical antiquity, all for adultery, all within about a forty year period during the 1st century BC, and all to virtually inaccessible islands. The title given to this picture at the 1780 Royal Academy exhibition leaves it ambiguous as to which of these three she is meant to be. The best known of three possible candidates, Julia, the only child of Emperor Augustus and his wife Scribonia, was the wife of the great Roman general Agrippa.

Like other artists, Joseph Wright went to Italy, but he was more interested in its natural effects than its art. It is apt that he should be known as Wright of derby, for it was there that he was to find pioneers of science and industry who provided him with subject-matter and with patrons. His is a provincial milieu, with serious rather than sophisticated interests, more doggedly bourgeois than the capital, and still optimistic about the benefits of progress. As Hogarth has been the initiator of ‘la peinture morale’, so Wright was the initiator, and the finest exponent, of the century’s final contribution to genre: the industrial picture.

This painting is one of a small number of important early candlelit subject paintings, all of which were painted in the late 1760s and early 1770s before he travelled to Italy, which both established the artist’s contemporary celebrity and for which he is most famous today.

The academy students, each suggesting a different stage in the awakening of artistic genius, are gathered around a copy of the famous Hellenistic sculpture “Nymph with a Shell” (from the Villa Borghese in Rome, now in the Louvre in Paris), which was widely known through casts and reproductions. But while Wright alludes to an artistic exemplum, he has also grounded his subject in fact. Art students were regularly given the exercise of drawing sculpture in lamplight and candlelight. Showing the sculpture as though warmed into life by the glow of the candles, Wright pays homage to the transformative, enlivening, even magical powers of light.

There exists another version (in a private collection) with a simple background.

This painting is one of a small number of important early candlelit subject paintings, all of which were painted in the late 1760s and early 1770s before he travelled to Italy, which both established the artist’s contemporary celebrity and for which he is most famous today.

The painting depicts six young draughtsmen, in various stages of adolescence, grouped around an antique marble statue known as the Borghese Nymph with a Shell, which dominates the composition. A first century Roman marble that was rediscovered during the Renaissance, it was much admired in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Wright’s day the original was housed at the Villa Borghese, in Rome, and it is now in the Louvre. In the early 1730s a marble copy of the statue was brought to England from Rome by the sculptor Peter Scheemakers, and it may be this that served as the model for Wright’s painting. A symbol of carefree childhood and a model of idealised beauty, it was heavily influential on artists across Europe.

The scene is dramatically lit by a single oil lamp, hidden from view behind the red drape that hangs down in the upper left of the composition. Its warm glow illuminates the statue, lending an almost warm fleshiness and a soft sensuality to the cold marble, whilst also picking out the ruddy features of the students themselves and throwing them into high relief.

There is another version, painted c. 1769, which has a number of significant changes to the composition. It is now in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

Wright studied under Thomas Hudson in London. In 1771 he became a member of the Society of Art and in 1784 of the Royal Academy. A visit to Italy, 1773-1775, gave him the opportunity to study the old masters. Caravaggio and his followers seem to have fascinated him particularly as shown in his later work with its dramatic light contrasts. On his return to England he tried briefly to set up a portrait practice in Bath, but then went back to Derby where he remained. Although primarily a portraitist, he also worked on his discovery of the scientific genre painting. He developed an understanding of how to refine the effect of lighting in order to bring emotion into an apparently objective atmosphere. In landscapes, too, he was innovative in his use of light sources.

Most of Joseph Wright’s paintings explore the effects of light and illumination. He counted amongst his close friends a number of factory owners and scientists, the very people who were the driving force behind the changes that came with the dawn of the industrial age, which was to bring so much profit and wreak such disaster. He was fascinated by mankind’s encounter with technology innovation and invention, and with the myth of a new era which he monumentalised in his paintings. The light that Caravaggio used to project his revelations and celestial visions seems to have fascinated Wright as well. But the spectator soon realizes that any similarity is misleading. In the work of Caravaggio, the source of light remains unknown so that it seems almost supernatural. Wright, on the other hand, uses light for dramatic effect. The experiment carried out by the elderly, long-haired scholar thus becomes an exciting theatrical scene.

The scientist is demonstrating the principle of the vacuum, Using a pump, he has emptied the glass sphere of air, creating a vacuum in which a bird seems to be struggling to gasp its last breath. Pained, the little girl turns her face away as though witnessing the martyrdom of a saint. Here, we find religious iconography being used to portray a worldly situation, elevating the scientific experiment to a para-religious event.

Wright had never crossed the Atlantic, but reading James Adair’s History of the American Indians (1775) he had found an account of the vigil kept by the widow of a brave ‘for the first moon … under his mourning war-pole’, and had painted his Widow of an Indian Chief to join three other pictures of women empowered by virtue, love or loyalty.

In this picture the Native American’s bearing is that of an antique statue, while the stormy shore with its volcano has more to do with Naples, which Wright had seen as a young man, than with America.

Wright was friendly with many notable English scientists, naturalists, and businessmen and became a sort of chronicler of the first stages of the industrial revolution that began in England during the Age of Enlightenment. The era’s naturalistic creed - of science bearing the light of civilization - found near literal expression in this painting through the sharp contrast of light and shade.

This is the last of the five paintings of an iron forge which the artist painted between 1771 and 1773.

This late work of the artist, depicting a landscape near Chesterfield, shows reminiscences of his journey to Italy.

Antiquity was the great theme in British painting in the last decades of the 18th century. Its influence can be traced in two areas particularly - in literature, which often comes close to the macabre, and in the excavations of antique sites, which were followed with intense interest at the time. Joseph Wright’s Miravan Opening the Grave of his Forefathers illustrates an example from literature. One story is that Miravan found on the grave of his forefathers the inscription: “In this grave lies a greater treasure than Croesus possessed.” But the central character finds only bones and another inscription: “Here dwells rest! Criminal, you seek gold among the dead? Go, greedy one, you will never find rest!” The subject has a double meaning. It not only illustrates the legend itself, but was also probably intended as a criticism of the growing desecration of antique sites.

Jane Darwin (1746-1835) was the daughter of Joseph Brown of Balderton, Nottinghamshire. In 1772 she married William Alvey Darwin, a lawyer and the elder brother of Erasmus Darwin (the grandfather of Charles Darwin). Their son William (1774-1841) is shown in the present portrait aged two.

By the time this portrait was commissioned Wright had developed a close friendship with the portrait artist George Romney. Romney’s influence can be seen in this portrait which appears to owe part of its inspiration to Romney’s portrait of Mrs Carwardine and her Child painted in the previous year. Both portraits acknowledge a debt to Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia.

Success as a portrait painter made money for Wright, but it was his scientific and industrial paintings, full of dramatic contrasts of light and darkness, which distinguished him from other contemporary artists and assured his unique position in British Art.

The sheer breadth of Wright’s achievements as a painter are illustrated not only by his work as a portraitist (where he is the equal of any artist of his age), his and innovatory dramatic candle-lit and scientific pictures, but also in his many and varied landscapes.

Deservedly popular for his dramatically illuminated interiors, Joseph Wright of Derby seldom did quite as well by the light of day. His Cloister of San Cosimato comes close to the border of subjective, Romantic landscape but lacks the courage of its barely intimidated convictions.

This is the only recorded painting of Florence by Joseph Wright of Derby, who visited the city between 19th June and 4th July 1775 on his way back from Rome. The view is taken from the south east, looking west along the Arno, with the famous Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore dominating the city’s skyline on the right.

This view of Lake Nemi, looking south east across the Campagna towards Mount Circeo on the coast, is one of a series of views by Wright of lakes Nemi and Albano from the early 1790s. Wright travelled in Italy between 1773 and 1775. His experience of the Italian landscape had a profound impact on his work and inspired many of his greatest paintings in the latter years of his life.

This landscape depicts a view of the old town of San Felice Circeo, with Mount Circeo beyond, at the northern end of the Gulf of Gaeta. Joseph Wright of Derby spent nearly two years travelling in Italy, for much of which he was based nearby in Rome, from where he would make sorties out into the neighbouring countryside to sketch the dramatic Italian scenery and absorb the Mediterranean light that so inspired him.

Wright of Derby’s views of extravagant and violent explosions (numbering thirty in all), with white lava shooting skywards, may never have been witnessed firsthand by the artist, who, in his few months spent in Naples, never saw anything more dramatic than lava pouring at snail’s pace down the mountain slopes. His pictures of raging flames and molten rocks almost certainly borrowed directly from Volaire, who had been an eye witness to all Vesuvius’s major eruptions since his arrival in Naples.