Before there were balloons made of rubber, there were bladders. You tied up one of the exits of the sac of elastic membrane extracted from the butchered pig, you poked a straw in the other, and you blew. The inflated globe was light and buoyant. If clad with leather, it became a ball to kick. Whether passed between hands or feet, it drew players together, a magnet for their eyes and energies. And we welcome what draws us together. Or do we curse it? Why do people team up around an emptiness, so much spent breath? All too easily it maddens them. Authorities have forever linked soccer with the misrule of the mob: What bounces is at best frivolous, at worst dangerous. Two boys tussling over a bladder in a three-foot-high canvas painted by Joseph Wright of Derby in the late 1760s snarl up in a whirlpool of pain, each twisting the other’s right ear. Their struggle has upturned the tabletop candle that illuminates the scene and any moment will surely extinguish it, effacing the giddy pattern formed by the writhing bodies and glowing, veiny bladder skin. An uncanny coming together: the cheek flesh of the upper child’s head—blubbery, wracked, and flushed—appears positively porcine.
People come together. So much is obvious: but mysteries may arise, if we ask what makes them do so. Joseph Wright chased that question in the set of paintings that the National Gallery is currently exhibiting. The curators Christine Riding and Lucy Bamford have brought together ten canvases that were originally shown in London between 1765 and 1773—the pieces thanks to which, during his mid-thirties, the North Midlands artist first secured a national reputation. Concentrating on this small group, they set aside Wright’s specialisms before and after: the prowess in portraiture that he built up after returning from a training in the capital to seek patronage locally, and the turn toward landscape that was cemented by the Italian trip for which he departed in 1773, a devotion that stayed with him till his death in 1797. The selected paintings are accompanied by mezzotints based on them that helped enhance Wright’s profits. We get to see how this most contemplative of English painters—more specifically, of proud regionalists, the home-loving son of Derby’s town clerk—could at the same time act as a canny showman, adept at working a metropolitan audience. Riding and Bamford also display models of what else transfixed that public—magic lanterns, toy theaters, and so on. The curators supply a historical backdrop, therefore, but discreetly, and without distracting us from Wright’s poetic originality.
These ten compositions depend on lights in darkness, most commonly generated by candles, by the moon, or—as in the most famous painting here, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (circa 1767)—by both. In effect, Wright was the first indigenous artist to introduce chiaroscuro to the oil-painting scene that was expanding in the Britain around him. The tenebrist canvases that were available for him to study in noblemen’s mansions had been painted by Dutch or Italian artists of the previous century, at one or two removes from Caravaggio. Captivating London viewers with pictures in the mode adopted from those foreign forebears, Wright created a fresh market brand.
If his dramatic tonal contrasts remain arresting to this day, it is partly because they still prompt the question of what purpose they serve. Subtitling their exhibition “From the Shadows,” Riding and Bamford hover between two interpretations of Wright’s innovation. When Benedict Nicolson published a seminal monograph on the artist in 1968, his subtitle was Painter of Light. In 2020 Matthew Craske published Painter of Darkness, an explicitly corrective successor study. The former presented the artist as the herald of a late-eighteenth-century “middle-class revolution” slowly gathering force around his North Midlands base, a cultural shift that valorized science, industry, and moneymaking. If Wright shrouded his backgrounds, it was the better to foreground those bright positives. Craske contrastingly situated Wright’s nocturnes within a proto-Romantic literary cult of night as the vehicle for sad, serious thoughts, ascribing to him a “bleak and sardonic vision of the human condition.”
Two Boys Fighting Over a Bladder (circa 1767–1770) suggests that the latter view has bite. Yet “candlelights” (as the genre came inclusively to be known) from just a few years earlier could lend themselves to Nicolson’s case. Wright first caused a sensation in the metropolis in 1766 when he exhibited A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place of the Sun. This nearly seven-foot-wide canvas features eight persons gathered in a darkened library around a brass-and-ivory orrery—a working model of the solar system that was named after the Earl of Orrery, an Irish patron of “natural philosophy.” A child silhouetted in the foreground blocks our view of the light source named in the title, but this shines back on two other boys who, rather than fighting, are gazing in happy wonder at the marvelous machine before them—a demonstration of the universe’s orderliness, the theme evidently expounded by the lordly “philosopher” who looms above them. A lady and three males—all worthy, well-dressed folk—also hearken and ponder. The shared admiration is not simply for Isaac Newton’s cosmic system but for the precision engineering that has delivered its visible representation in metal.
In the outermost circle—beyond the rounds of planets and of listeners—we ourselves, as Wright’s viewers, are invited to admire the precision picturing. There is never a thoughtless mark in his art. His care for detail—the zodiacal names inscribed on the orrery’s bounding hoop, the pearls in the lady’s necklace—combines with his eye for the “curious and delicate hues” presented by objects under lamplight. Wright’s friend John Leigh Philips, who used that phrase to praise his chromatic finesse, also linked him to Britain’s “middle-class revolution” and its values of empiricism and engineering when he noted in his memorial tribute that the painter had invented his own form of camera obscura, the better to study those optical phenomena. At the same time, this analytical technician was an experienced portrait painter, able to assess characters in the round and grant each a distinctive warmth of feeling: the august lecturer, the guileless children, a poetic youth brooding over the ivory planets. He was a strong pictorial composer, moreover, clamping observational studies of figures (those ear pullers, for instance) within stout formal bonds. On all these fronts, the North Midlands studio could claim to lead the field in 1760s Europe.
Two other concentrically arranged candlelights fix on exemplars that artists all across the continent saluted. In one, Wright shows three enthusiasts for the antique huddled around a desk-mounted statuette of a heroic warrior; in the other, six junior trainees circle a plinth to study a French sculptor’s Venus. They study her with the range of motivations that teenage boys might have, Wright quietly implies. The portraitist in him savors such human variety, along lines familiar from British drama and fiction. When he switches his subject, for instance, from devotees of classicism to workmen in a blacksmith’s shop, the smith is rendered as a virile hero, while his mate with the bellows becomes a leery roué who could have stepped straight out of a vintage BBC sitcom.
With this latter picture, Wright was stretching his adopted genre—with some effort, for in his preparatory notes he worried how to contrive a backstory in which a horse might be shod at night, so that white-hot iron could be the source of the chiaroscuro. In the upshot, he backed up this contrivance not only with a moon breaking through parting clouds but by installing the smithy in a ruinous ancient building—so that in its shadows, classical statuary makes a return appearance. We might nonetheless see an inclusive spirit behind all the make-believe. Trust to skill and honest toil, even as you trust to canons of beauty. Drawn together by those causes, humans incrementally progress.
Viewed this way, the “painter of light” becomes a painter of the Enlightenment. But does Wright’s chiaroscuro have a stable meaning? Consider the additional periodizing twist he gave to the formula in a canvas exhibited in London in 1771. Within a high, dark Gothic chamber, a light-suffused flask illuminates an awestruck graybeard who kneels before it amid a clutter of books and other vessels; the full title is The Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and Prays for the Successful Conclusion of His Operation, as Was the Custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers. Alchemists, as both the decor and the title indicate, were history by this stage—blunderers down a blind alley who merely stumbled on an unforeseen source of radiance. Yet the respect with which the astonished old man is portrayed precludes any condescension to the past. If he is partly ignorant, then he is not more so than those gathered around the Orrery’s solar system, or around the sculptures, or around the anvil—no less so, either, than the boys contesting the bladder.
These compositions, that is to say, all revolve around an x, a quantity with no fixed value. Sometimes Wright uses a light source, sometimes a closed vessel, to denote this lure for human attention; sometimes he conjoins them. In An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, the Orrery’s yet more ambitious successor, his variable amounts to a zero. The pump—a handsome state-of-the-art mechanical contraption—expels air from a lidded glass chamber to create a vacuum; unless the “experimenter” working it releases the lid, the bird trapped within it must die. Among the nine members of the middle class who have gathered one evening to watch this impresario of pop science, the chief highlights fall on two tearful little girls who are as yet unaware that he will end his scare show by granting the bird life. And it is as with a play or a novel: our sympathies may at first latch on to them but then migrate to their grandfather insisting that all will be well, or to a lad who by contrast hopes to witness a kill, or to a blade and a beauty too busy making eyes at each other to pay the cliff-hanger any heed. They may hover without settling as we turn to the traveling showman who works the air pump and who is surely earning his fee, for huckster though he may be, he has fathomless panache. Fiction on this level is not tendentious: not pro-science, not anti-, not for light or exactly for dark. It stirs, it sets in play.
Nonetheless, there is a tilt toward the shadows. Attentiveness may be the stuff of these chiaroscuros: as handled here that genre becomes a frame for this mode of mind, with the result that the exhibition bristles with stares and furrowed brows; but in the Experiment on a Bird, as in the Boys Fighting, Wright allows that what most sucks us in is a void. Except for the oblivious lovers, the watchers of the show are so many moths to death’s flame. That ten-figure masterpiece, the largest canvas here, seems to have been an effort that scarred Wright. His letters (which are prevailingly mild-mannered, except when London’s art cabals fail to recognize his seriousness) suggest that he was paralyzed by depression for months after its completion. The experience is evidently refracted in the one composition here that is partly inept. In Wright’s Philosopher by Lamplight the figure sits inside a dark cave with only a skeleton for company. Glumly, this old hermit tests the hinging of its humerus and ulna, the human frame reduced to cold mechanism. He does not notice two rambling, carefree youths who have stepped up to the cave mouth and are about to venture within. Whether either has noticed him is unclear, as Wright has fumbled the spatial relation between the figures. Previous candlelights were indoor affairs; the painter was himself pushing into unfamiliar terrain. Comings together are here yielding, in his priorities, to the image of the solitary truth seeker.
Yet the exhibition ends with the succeeding breakthrough. Among the final pictures that Wright sent to London before, married at thirty-nine, he left for Italy was a nocturnal landscape of peculiar force. Portrait painting had taught him that the manner should cleave to the subject: in An Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent, the new theme was nature, and the facture consequently changed. For “nature,” read the wild energies that course through whatever surrounds us—such as the composition’s moonlit craggy valley—outrunning our own lives and deaths. Rock faces, rushing waters, night clouds, and storm-torn tree trunks have been thrust down on the canvas in tumbling, ferocious impastos. Mortality becomes a kind of eddy in this swirl, for the task that the picture’s protagonist—a lone, lantern-lit old workman—performs is a peculiar inversion of the gravedigger’s. He goes out with his spade the night before a fox hunt to fill all entrances to “earths” in which the fleeing animal might take refuge, thus ensuring that the morrow will end with a death. At once somber and exultant, this vision of rural Derbyshire could prompt many a line of reflection. Try hanging it beside the sublime wildernesses of Salvator Rosa, the seventeenth-century master from whom Wright had been learning; try placing it opposite Courbet’s accounts, circa 1850, of labor, earth, and death in the rocky Franche-Comté. Whose eye might then appear the keenest? As it stands, the current hang at the National Gallery will reward many a return visit.
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