Joseph Wright of Derby

1734–1797

The first painter to take the industrial revolution as a subject, and the first English master of artificial light. He stayed in Derby, kept company with the scientists and manufacturers of the Lunar Society circle, and painted what they did — a lecture on the orrery, an experiment on a bird in an air pump, a forge at night — as if it were sacred history.

The five works below hang at the Yale Center for British Art and include The Blacksmith's Shop, the earliest and most ambitious of his night-forge pictures.

Life

Joseph Wright was born in Irongate, Derby, on 3 September 1734, and apart from two spells in London and a Bath interlude he lived there all his life — hence the name. He trained from 1751 under Thomas Hudson, the portraitist who had taught Reynolds, and came home to paint the Derby professional class.

In the 1760s he found his subject. Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery and An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump made him the painter of the new science and its new men. He was never a member of the Lunar Society, but Erasmus Darwin was his friend and doctor, John Whitehurst his neighbour and sitter, Wedgwood and Arkwright his patrons.

He went to Italy in 1773 and left Rome in June 1775 without ever seeing Vesuvius erupt — then painted it erupting, from memory and imagination, more than thirty times. The Royal Academy elected him an Associate in 1781 and a full member in 1784; he refused the honour over a slight and had nothing more to do with the Academy officially, though he went on sending pictures. He died at his house in Queen Street, Derby, on 29 August 1797.

Works

The Blacksmith's Shop

Three smiths hammer a white-hot bar on the anvil inside what was once a church. The roof is gone, the moon shows through the arches, and the only other light is the iron. Wright gave the picture a story — a traveller's horse has thrown a shoe in the night, and the forge has been woken to mend it — but the real subject is the glow, and the way it turns a workshop into an altar.

Signed and dated 1771, this is the earliest and most ambitious of five forge pictures he made over the next two years. It was sold to Peniston Lamb, the first Viscount Melbourne.

Matlock Tor by Moonlight

The limestone cliff above the Derwent under a full moon, and at the bottom edge a lone rider whose horse has stopped to look. One of the first Derbyshire landscapes Wright painted after Italy, when he brought the moonlight of the Bay of Naples home and found it worked just as well on the Peak. A near-identical version is in Detroit.

Virgil's Tomb by Moonlight, with Silius Italicus

The Roman consul Silius Italicus bought the estate where Virgil was buried, and every year on the anniversary of the poet's death went into the tomb and recited his verses. Wright shows him doing it: a small figure with a lamp inside the ruined vault near Naples, the moon outside, the light inside. Two kinds of illumination, which is the whole of Wright in one picture. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1779.

Matlock Dale, looking toward Black Rock Escarpment

Daylight, for once. The road, the river and the village lie under the Black Rock cliffs on the Derwent, a few miles from Wright's door. He painted Matlock in every light he could find; this is the plainest and the most exact, the Derbyshire he actually lived in rather than the one he lit for drama.

Landscape with a Rainbow

One of the last pictures he painted, three years before his death: a rainbow over a river valley after rain, the light breaking at the far side. After thirty years of forges, furnaces and volcanoes, Wright ended with the one natural phenomenon that is only light. Yale acquired it in 2014 and showed it in 2023.