1734 - 1797 • English • Painter • Romantic
"'Tis the most wonderful sight in Nature." - Joseph Wright of Derby
The connection between science and art has taken many forms, but before Joseph Wright of Derby they were usually implicit rather than explicit. For example, paintings that incorporated new discoveries, like PERSPECTIVE in the r 5th century, did not show the discovery being demonstrated. Similarly, artists during the 17th century took advantage of the CAMERA OBSCURA, but did not paint the camera obscura itself. During the Age of ENLIGHTENMENT, however, Joseph Wright took an unusual step: He painted scientific experimentation as a dramatic subject in its own right. Wright painted the demonstrators, lecturers, and popularizers of exciting new knowledge in the heroic vein of HISTORY PAINTING. A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrery (in which a lamp is put in place of the sun) (c. 1763-65) is an example. An orrery- named after Charles Boyle, fourth Earl of Orrery, for whom one was made-is a mechanical model of the solar system. In Wright's picture, the lamp standing in for the sun illuminates the people in the audience observing the model as mysteriously as if it were the holy light of God. The analogy is not accidental in a period when human inventions and discoveries were beginning to refashion the world from an agricultural- to an industrial-based economy and science seemed to displace religion. It was a time during which, as the philosopher Richard Rorty writes, "the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe." Josiah Wedgwood, whose company pioneered in mass producing POTTERY, and Sir Richard Arkwright, who revolutionized the textile industry, were patrons for works like those of Wright. There is an underlying emotional fervor and a sense of the heroic in Wright's paintings that ally him with the ROMANTIC movement, and in general he is known for images with extraordinary lighting effects: Besides the Lecture at the Orrery, he painted forges and smithies, fireworks, and (the ultimate fireworks) the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which he saw during a trip to Italy that lasted from 1773 to 1775. It was about that eruption that his comment, quoted above, was made. While pictures like these are of great interest to us today, he earned his livelihood by painting portraits.
