There is a painting so great, and so strange, in the city of Derby as to be worth the visit to the gallery alone. It shows a group of spectators gathered in deep darkness round a clockwork model of the solar system. Their faces are illuminated only by an invisible source: the hidden lamp that stands in for the sun.
Two children sit rapt, beaming at the tiny toy planets before them. A scholar takes notes from the red-robed scientist at the centre, who is giving a lecture on astronomy. But as you look from one face to the next – each shown at a different angle, like planetary phases – it gradually seems that the knowledge is overpowering to a young man on the right, who appears almost blinded, and a young woman on the left, lost in the strangeness she beholds. Enlightenment – either literal or metaphorical – is not so simple.
Joseph Wright’s A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery (1766) has pride of place in Derby Museum and Art Gallery, as it should. During his life and long after his death, Wright (1734-97) was chiefly known for two things: having his name infrangibly bound to the Midlands town of his birth, and being Britain’s best painter of candlelight. His lighting is certainly virtuosic, some of its strengths learned from studying Caravaggio and the French painter Georges de la Tour’s amazing power with candles. But Wright’s light is something else too, curious and often ambiguous.
Derby Museum and Art Gallery has amassed the largest collection of this 18th-century master anywhere in the world. They have his fabulous painting of three blacksmiths hammering away at an incandescent metal bar in what looks like classical ruins: a temple to the white-hot heat of technology. They have his scientist discovering phosphorescence by night in a sepulchral laboratory.
On his knees, in what appears to be a secular nativity, he is giving thanks for the eerie glowing beam that is radiating out of the hole in a luminous glass flask, as if the sight was divine. But the room is dark, the architecture medieval and the arched windows high and gothic. The moon, seen through them, shines as bright as the flask below, as if to mock this immense advance in science.
In fact, the painting’s title gives an altogether different inflection to the scene: The Alcyhmist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus. The man on his knees, who was trying to turn base metal into gold, has himself been transformed into a scientist – but only by accident.
Wright is an extraordinarily versatile painter, and probably the first to make a celebrated career for himself outside London. He went there as a young man to study with Thomas Hudson, who also taught Joshua Reynolds. A chalk portrait of Hudson shows Wright’s graceful gift for drawing a sage face. And in the so-called Self-Portrait at the Age of About Forty, Wright is holding a porte-crayon, with black and white chalks at either end, as if to signal both his draughtsmanship and his reputation for chiaroscuro. He looks so mirthful and vital it is sad to think how he suffered from what was then known as melancholy.
Derby acquired this dynamic self-portrait (which turns out to have a fabulous study for the celebrated An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump on its reverse) only last year, partly in lieu of inheritance tax, but also through donations from the Art Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund. Now it has acquired two more paintings, on long-term loan from a private collector, barely shown in public until last month.
In one, a girl sits reading a letter by candlelight, an old man squinting over her shoulder through lorgnettes. The event takes place, as almost always, by night. The candle is once again concealed, this time between her person and the letter, which we see as radiantly backlit, the writing almost – but not quite – decipherable. A couple of comical ink stains lead the eyes upwards to the girl’s sweet expression, suggesting that the news is good. This is not the first time they have relished that letter, with its gently worn folds.
In the next scene, two boys are fighting over a blown-up bladder, so ingeniously lit it resembles a lunar lantern. Tousled hair, abrupt motion, the sound of shouting: they could be any young lads squabbling over a game, one wrenching at the other’s ear lobe. There is a strong hint of the Dutch Caravaggists of the 17th century about Wright’s chiaroscuro, but something far more timeless about possession of the ball.
And what they show, in their combination of humour and exceptional skill, is the immense diversity of Joseph Wright. Here is a painter who can produce Italian nocturnes, moonlit waterways and scenes of scientific revelation, who can paint Richard Arkwright as a local magnate of colossal girth with hippopotamus eyes, and buttons the size of medals; and lame, fat, stammering Erasmus Darwin as a poet among scientists, alluringly intelligent, the father of countless children.
Darwin started the Derby Philosophical Society, which would eventually merge with the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Today’s museum feels uniquely intimate. Here is Arkwright, and then a painting of his cotton mill, where the 12-hour shifts ran right through the night; and then a clock designed by John Whitehurst to record the running time of machines alongside standard time, on two dials; and then Wright’s portrait of Whitehurst.
Here too is the 120,000-year-old hippo found in a Derby suburb; the Roman dice discovered beneath the ring road; the pigeon King of Rome, which broke all speed records racing 1,001 miles back home from Italy in 1913. And all of this appears alongside French revolutionary shoes, Cycladic figures, samurai armour, Egyptian mummies and dinosaurs that children can touch.
All this place needs, as the gallery prepares to show 400 of Wright’s lithe and animate drawings in 2024, alongside his painted masterpieces, is a massive dose of money (come on, plutocrats) to lift its premises and presentation up to the standards of its Enlightenment stars. Then Derby Museum and Art Gallery can be what it ought to be, a miniature rival to the British Museum, without all the stealing.
Derby Museum and Art Gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10am–5pm, Sundays 12-4pm
