Joseph Wright of Derby: Out of the Shadows

     

     To London for a couple of days.  And very welcome it was. Gallery-going and shopping.

     On our first day we went to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square to see the exhibition 'Wright of Derby: From the Shadows'.  A small exhibition, but rather the eye-opener that caused me to refresh my interest in this most remarkable of painters.  I've known of, and to a certain extent admire, the work of Joseph Wright for years now, but it remained, to me at least, rather sunk in the general miasma of 18th century British art.  I knew some of his work, particularly 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump' 1768, possibly his most famous work; 'An Iron Forge' of 1772; and his arresting 'Portrait of Brooke Boothby' of 1781.  The rest was a terra incognita.

     Wright was born in the English East Midland city of Derby in 1734 and was trained in London. He worked in his home town, in Bath and Liverpool, at various stages of his life. He is connected to both Romanticism and the British Enlightenment.  He was a friend of Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood and Joseph Arkwright, and has been called 'the first painter of the Industrial Revolution'. He was a fine portraitist and landscape painter, but we tend to think of him for his dramatic tenebrist paintings - Wright called them his 'Candlelight' paintings - which he painted from the 1760s onwards, of which 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump' is the finest, and most famous, example.  A nocturnal, often occluded, world.  Tenebrism, I should explain at this point, is an essentially Baroque technique, an extreme form of Chiaroscuro.  Coincidentally, the work of another, earlier, tenebrist, the enigmatic French painter Georges de La Tour was the subject of an almost concurrent exhibition in Paris, at the Musee Jacquemart Andre.

     Staged within a suitably darkened gallery space, this exhibition, which is on until May 10th before moving on to Derby, concentrates solely on that tenebrism.  The first to do so, apparently. 

     The paintings on display - they are all oils - are accompanied by a wall of mezzotints - quite the perfect media - of those paintings.  Which, I wonder, influenced the selection of the other?

     With the exception of one painting - The Earthstopper of 1773 - these are rather contained if not, at times, claustrophobic images. Perhaps the most extreme and strange - and virtuosic - is Two Boys fighting over a Bladder of 1770.  The bodies of the boys - one in complete and deep shadow - fill the canvas to the exclusion of all else except the bladder which is lit eerily enough from a hidden light source.  That hidden light source is a recurring motif in these works, and it used to great effect throughout.

     Although thought of as an Enlightenment painter these paintings, in addition to their claustrophobia, have a rather intense dreamlike quality.  We are called to enter into a world of mystery and initiation - an initiation amongst other things into the worlds of craft, science and alchemy.  A world of the Gothic.