A white cockatoo is on the verge of death as air is sucked from its glass trap. Two young girls look on, aghast. Maybe the croaking fowl is their pet? That unfortunate bird is the center of attention in Joseph Wright’s 1768 painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. A beloved artwork in the U.K., the piece is a marquee draw in the National Gallery in London’s new “Wright of Derby: From the Shadows” exhibition. It is not as if Wright did not have alternatives to using the demise of a fine-looking bird for the image. A sealed paper bag would have inflated as oxygen was removed from the glass globe, for example. But that would have been boring, and Wright was a dramatist. Plus, none of this would be happening without the wild-haired pump operator looking out from the canvas. He is in charge. If he stopped the pump and allowed the air back into the glass, the bird would survive. Talk about tension.
Born in the northern English town of Derby in 1734, Joseph Wright was working during the Age of Enlightenment. The air pump was a relatively new invention, a contraption that demonstrated that the atmosphere was something that could be manipulated, a radical idea in the eighteenth century. Until then, religion and ancient philosophy had explained what things were. Air was an Aristotelian element, an unchangeable substance that sat between earth and fire. So, amid the drama, Wright was also documenting the kind of scientific development that characterized the era’s new thinking. His 1771 painting The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosophers Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers shows the German alchemist Hennig Brand accidentally discovering phosphorus while trying to turn a base metal into gold. As with his air pump painting, Wright was laying out a key moment in science. Although Benjamin Franklin had been experimenting with lightning conduction since the 1750s, electricity had yet to become a source of light and power. So Hennig’s incidental discovery—that man could manufacture an artificial light source—was another epochal lightbulb moment.
The theme of light runs throughout the exhibition. There are more than 20 pieces on view, concentrating on Wright’s candlelit work, the period when the artist used single sources of light to build atmosphere and anticipation. And with the light comes the dark. Wright’s dense, flat shadows frame the action, bringing depth and theater to the fore. It is natural to compare his output with artwork by another great dramatist and master of light, Caravaggio. Both artists employed the dark-light schematic of chiaroscuro, although Wright tended toward tenebrism, a more contrast-heavy variation. Where Caravaggio’s sense of tension stemmed from emotional turmoil and social vérité, Wright’s work was more pastoral and less dangerous, unless you are a bird, despite his dramatic leanings. Caravaggio, of course, had painted his last works roughly one hundred years earlier. Nonetheless, Wright’s work is stunning. Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent from 1773 is a pastoral case in point. A man is filling in earths, also known as foxholes, to stop foxes from hiding in their dens during the next day’s hunt along the River Derwent. As the digger toils, the night sky looms above. In A Philosopher by Lamplight, painted around 1769, the philosopher stands outdoors, examining human bones in his quest to understand anatomy, lit by a single lamp’s flame.
Wright’s work is steeped in real-life situations, but it is also rich in symbolism. Completed in 1766, A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place shows a scientist demonstrating the solar system’s orbits. At the same time, it stands in for the Age of Enlightenment’s broader epiphanies. Pulsing at the orrery’s center, the sun casts a newly birthed light as science triumphs over religion and superstition. The exhibition’s curators have positioned an actual orrery in a vitrine beside the painting, a careful reproduction of the original machine. Wright’s local connections to figures such as Josiah Wedgwood of Wedgwood pottery, Richard Arkwright, an industrial mechanization pioneer, and astronomer James Ferguson, who frequently lectured in Derby, meant he moved among leading minds in science and industry. In recording genuine experiments, Wright’s paintings function as reportage, documenting the accumulating technological breakthroughs that paved the way toward the Industrial Revolution.
There are more parochial paintings on view as well. Both from 1770, Two Boys Fighting Over a Bladder and A Girl Reading a Letter with an Old Man Reading Over her Shoulder appear kitschy and Rockwell-esque. These are fanciful, sentimental depictions of everyday life that were fashionable at the time. Even so, the composition of the struggling youths is intriguing. From a distance, one of the figures looks like an act of vandalism, a swirling smudge of black paint on the canvas. Closer inspection reveals the boy has his back to us and is rendered almost entirely as a shadowy silhouette. His adversary reels back, clutching his ear in agony. It is clever stuff.
Wright made five versions in his The Blacksmith’s Shop series. The 1771 example on view here, like Earthstopper, is staged in the dead of night. This time, the primary light source is the lump of metal the farriers are hammering into shape. The glowing metal picks out the blacksmiths’ flushed cheeks and beaded brows as the moon glowers through the workshop roof.
Wright’s sense of theater was immersive. The figures in his larger paintings are nearly life-sized. Imagine the reaction when they were first unveiled. This was life in high definition, with viewers cast as participants, absorbing the scenes around them. More than 250 years on, Wright of Derby’s paintings remain an enthralling testament to a master of illumination.
“Wright of Derby: From the Shadows“ is at the National Gallery in London through May 10, 2026. Advanced booking is recommended.
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