Watch the Birdie
Gazing into the Dramatic and Enlightening ‘Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump’, Painted by Joseph Wright of Derby in 1768…
This stunning painting is a narrative that was very much of its moment and still poses questions to us in the twenty-first century about our attitudes to advancements in science. At almost two-and-a-half metres across, it’s the largest of Joseph Wright’s candlelight pictures. Although he also painted portraits in the Rococo style, similar to Thomas Gainsborough, he’s best remembered for moody landscapes and dramatically lighted paintings of scientific subjects.
Joseph Wright of Derby was one of the most accomplished English painters of the eighteenth-century and the beautiful precision of this oil on canvas painting attests to this. Wright trained in London under Thomas Hudson, a talented portrait painter who, in turn, had trained under Joshua Reynolds. Yet Wright returned to Derby and chose not to be based in London because Derby, at that time, was at the centre of the new Industrial Revolution — the ‘Silicon Valley’ of its day.
Wright knew many entrepreneurs such as Josiah Wedgwood (of pottery fame), and Erasmus Darwin (uncle of Charles) who met each month on the Monday nearest the full moon — so they called their society the Lunar Club. This meant they could…
