Wright of Derby: From the Shadows review – Science, Skeletons and the Choking Parrot | art

HHe seems to be up to no good. Deep into the night, under trees and clouds turned silver and black by the full moon, a man works with a shovel. Is he burying a body or digging up parts for a Frankensteinian experiment? After all, this painting was painted by Joseph Wright of Derby, a friend of the pioneering scientists and industrialists at the Lunar Society of Birmingham, leaders of the new science that would inspire Mary Shelley.

But the man beside the foaming River Derwent does not collect body parts. He does something completely heinous by 21st century moral standards: blocking off the fox den so the foxes can’t return to it and the hunting game will be easy tomorrow. Perhaps Wright shares my sympathy for foxes, because the ground plug on the banks of the Derwent is actually a bit sinister. Yet it has a hypnotic beauty. Two sources of light – the lantern and the moon – make this an undead night as we almost hear the rustle of leaves, the rush of white water and the sound of a spade. It’s one thing to paint landscapes by day. Wright makes one come alive fantastically at night.

The National Gallery’s close look at Wright’s paintings of darkness and light reveals that he was the first Gothic artist. The Gothic novel was invented when Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764; Wright painted his Journeys into the Terrors of the Night in the 1760s and 1770s. But the blood-curdling secret at the heart of these paintings is scientific, not supernatural.

In Philosopher of Lamplight, two young travelers find more than they bargained for. They stumble over a moonlight stream into a cave lit by a single candle, and look in horror at an old man playing with a skeleton, raising his bony leg as his skull stares out of hollow eyes. A hermit is a philosopher trying to solve the mystery of what happens when we die. But the answer is nothing. Because with science taking over Europe in the 18th century as a means of rationally understanding nature, God may have died, according to radical minds such as Erasmus Darwin, a friend of the Wright of Derby, Charles’s grandfather.

In the blacksmith’s shop, the glowing metal the blacksmith is working on illuminates a ruined building: the workshop is located inside a classical temple with Corinthian columns. This is an unmistakable reference to Renaissance nativity paintings where the stable is often a dilapidated Roman temple, symbolizing the death of paganism and the rise of Christianity. What can it represent here except that the modern material world is in turn born from the wreckage of Christianity?

Open your eyes to the nature of the universe, and the true magic of science, urges this Enlightenment artist in his wonderful painting “A Philosopher Lectures on the Diagram in which the Lamp is Placed in the Place of the Sun.” The National Gallery offers a real orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, for comparison.

One of the reasons Wright’s drawing is so mesmerizing is that you see it on different levels from the viewpoints of the audience gathered around the model in an obscure library. Get close to the children’s fascinated faces and they appear wide; Standing far back, it is a scholarly game, small compared to the lecturer and the man next to him who is diligently taking notes. The world views him with suspicion; The woman wearing a hat and jewelry looks a little empty-eyed. Compared to children, these adults are less curious.

Shock tactics may be needed. Wright’s ‘Orerie’, like other paintings here from the fine collection of his works at Derby Museum, is collected with his other great scientific spectacle, ‘Experiment on a Bird at an Air Pump’ in the National Gallery. Painted two years after Oriri, it shifts the focus from wonder to awe. One of the girls hides her face, too terrified to look at her – because the lecturer is about to create a vacuum in a glass room, killing the white parrot inside.

Wright gives this experience a strict reality. It is the pinnacle of his use of light that penetrates the darkness to define objects and spaces. The machine at the heart of the action is a massive structure, its wooden shaft and brass fittings suggesting that steam engines were perfected by members of the Lunar Society. In the immortal words of the association’s co-founder Matthew Bolton: “I sell here, sir, what the whole world wants: power!”

The audience in Wright’s painting includes members of the local gentry in a Georgian country house, but the power is not in their hands. It’s a new kind of power that the world has. An 18th-century Oppenheimer stares down at us as he prepares to turn the handle, kill the bird, and detonate the bomb. Wright does not reject science, but he imagines that it will change these people’s world—and our world—just as it would change that bird’s death. Candlelight from behind fills a glass bowl with liquid light as if it were radiating, illuminating a human skull. This was intended to be a rational display of emptiness, but it became a nightmarish theater of science, power, cruelty, and death. Perhaps the younger girl, who cannot take her eyes off the horror, is planning a Gothic novel of her own.