Wright of Derby: From the Shadows

The National Gallery reunifies Joseph Wright of Derby’s trio of candlelit masterpieces, while revealing some of the painter’s lesser-known marvels

Joseph Wright of Derby, Self-Portrait in a Black Feathered Hat, about 1767-70 (detail). Charcoal heightened with white chalk on paper, 53.3 x 36.8 cm. Derby Museum and Art Gallery (1953-186). © Derby Museums.

National Gallery, London
7 November 2025 — 10 May 2026

by JOE LLOYD

Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) is one of the most familiar masterpieces of British art. Yet it remains a profoundly unsettling image. It depicts a group of people gathering by night to watch a demonstration of a vacuum. A bird – a cockatoo, a type of parrot that, in reality, was too expensive to use in such a risky experiment – panics at the bottom of a glass jar as its air is sucked out. A young girl watches with horrified anticipation, while her companion averts her eyes from the bird’s likely death. Some of the witnesses look on eagerly, while others seem distracted. A wild-haired scientist meets our gaze, as if asking us what we think might happen next. We see all this through the pale light cast through a bowl, illuminated by a hidden candle, which also seems to contain a chunk of a skull.

Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768. Oil on canvas, 183 x 244 cm. © The National Gallery, London.

The Air Pump is the largest of Wright’s great “candlelit” paintings, which catapulted him to the front rank of English artists. First there was Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765), whose protagonists examine a miniature reproduction of a classical sculpture. Then came A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp is Put in the Place of the Sun (1766), in which people of various ages examine a mechanical model of the solar system. All three of these works are now reunited in the National Gallery’s laser-focused exhibition, organised in collaboration with Derby Museums, which charts Wright’s career between his London exhibition debut in 1765 and his Italian tour of 1773, after which he became increasingly devoted to painting luminous landscapes.

Joseph Wright of Derby, Two Boys Fighting Over a Bladder, about 1767-70. Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 71.2 cm. Private collection, care of Omnia Art Ltd. © Omnia Art Ltd.

Wright was a canny operator. Born to a prosperous family of the middling sort, he paid great attention to carving out a sustainable career. He started with portraits, in demand works that could help foster relationships with long-term patrons. But he also knew that he had to develop his own metier to stand-out in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Tenebrism – a style of which uses extreme contrasts of dark and light, influenced by Caravaggio and inescapable in the early 17th century – remained popular in Britain. Yet there had not yet been a native-born English painter committed to the style, nor one who used it to depict the present moment.

Wright saw his opening and seized it. But his candlelit works were not revivals of an old trend. He paid attention, like few had before him, to sources of light and how they worked. He primed his canvases in light lead paint, which could be left exposed to create a glowing effect; sometimes he mixed in silver leaf for further gleam. By the late 1760s, he had created his own box-like viewing contraption that allowed him to perceive the effects of candlelight on items while working in a well-lit room. The light effects in his paintings have all the drama of their predecessors with an added fidelity to the laws of physics. We see the side of The Gladiator’s torso, but the prime illuminated view is reserved for the two younger men peering from by the candle. The woman at the left of The Orrery seems to be straining her eyes to make out the model.

Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place, 1764-1766. Oil on canvas, 147.3 x 203.2 cm. Derby Museum and Art Gallery (1884-168). © Derby Museums.

This combination of subject matter and exactitude has seen Wright retroactively cast as a chronicler of the onward march of science. Neither The Orrery nor the Air Pump were novel to Wright’s era. A form of orrery dates back to Ancient Greece. The air pump had been invented by Otto von Guericke in 1650; Robert Boyle conducted his celebrated experiments with birds in the subsequent decade. By 1768, it was very old hat. Rather than chronicling the newfangled, Wright is capturing what had become quotidian. His demonstrator is not a pioneer but a showman. The painting shows not discovery but dissemination, as previously recondite ideas were spread out among a larger section of society.

Wright himself was an expert at dissemination, commissioning the best engravers to reproduce his paintings. His mezzotints could be sold to a wider audience than his paintings, while spreading his reputation wide. Despite the fame that his candlelit works brought, Wright was not content to rest on his laurels. After The Air Pump, he started expanding his visual universe. At the National Gallery, The Gladiator is displayed alongside An Academy by Lamplight (1769), which depicts a similar scene of young men – this time mere boys – examining a classical sculpture. But here the light is warmer and smoother, and we can grasp more of the surrounding architecture. He started experimenting with multiple sources of light; several works contrast a candle or lantern with the pale glow of the moon.

Joseph Wright of Derby, The Blacksmiths Shop, 1771. Oil on canvas, 125.7 x 99 cm. Derby Museum and Art Gallery. © Derby Museums.

Although Wright’s candlelit paintings have often been considered paradigmatic artworks of the Enlightenment, there are aspects of his works that seem to gesture towards the sublimity, mysticism and anachronisms of the Romantic movement that would follow. His Blacksmith’s Shop (1771) sits within an improbably vast neo-classical ruin, while his Alchymist (c1771) appears to have taken residence in a cathedral. Edmund Burke had written about the sublime in 1757. A Philosopher by Lamplight (c1769) shows another wild-haired experimentalist dandling a pair of human arm bones. He could be a modern anatomist. Yet he is dressed like a desert hermit in tattered brown robes, and he conducts his experiment in a cave. Behind him, two young men in more contemporary attire enter the cave like a pair of explorers, their motion and companionship contrasting with the philosopher’s solitude. Have they gone spelunking and ended up in the past?

Joseph Wright of Derby, 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, 1795. Oil on canvas, 127 x 101.6 cm. Derby Museum and Art Gallery. © Derby Museums.

The latest painting on display, Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent (1773), shows a ragged labourer pushing a shovel down with his foot. Wright was an admirer of the forbidding landscapes of the Neapolitan painter Salvator Rosa, and there is something of Rosa in Wright’s gloomy Derbyshire nocturne. While that artist populated his landscapes with witches and biblical figures, however, Wright represented contemporary working-class life. His unadorned, exhausted earthstopper pre-empts Jean-François Millet. As ever, the light – moon and lantern – is meticulously worked out. We can just about make out a pale horse in a grove, illuminated rear-first. As with The Air Pump, we are suspended before an act of violence against animals – an earthstopper blocks foxholes before a hunt. Wright captures the way night can make even the most mundane scene glower with cosmic mystery.