Light on Wright
PAUL GRINKE
Joseph Wright of Derby Benedict Nicolson (Routledge and- Kegan Paul two volumes 12 gns) An Italian Sketchbook Richard Wilson (Rout- ledge and Kegan Paul 6 gns) Concerning Architecture edited by Sir John Summerson (Allen Lane the Penguin Press £6 3s) Long dismissed as a provincial artist unfit to join the metropolitan ranks of Gains- borough or Reynolds, Joseph Wright, or Wright of Derby as he is better known, is one of the most interesting English painters of 'the eighteenth century and one of the most gifted. Benedict Nicolson's life of Wright, as con- sidered and well written as one might have expected from the editor of the Burlington Magazine, is the first serious account of this extraordinary artist and in the depth and range of its treatment deserves to be placed on the shelf alongside the great artists' biographies of the past. Nurtured and produced under the wing of the Mellon Foundation, no expense has been spared to provide a detailed illus- trative catalogue of Wright's oeuvre, a profusion of footnotes to satisfy the most arcane researcher and an appropriately sump- tuous format. It is unlikely to be superseded.
Wright is remembered today not for his por- traits, which range from the frankly indifferent to some skilful work in the classic manner, but as the painter of the Industrial Revolu- tion in the style of the seventeenth century Dutch candlelight masters, of whom Mr Nicol- son has made a previous study. His paintings are, in fact, inseparable from the ferment of ideas which characterised the technological revolution in the Midlands and found its most notable exponents in the Birmingham Lunar Society, an intellectual group of scientists, savants and industrialists which included Wedgwood, Edgeworth and the polymath Erasmus Darwin.
As a child Wright enjoyed tinkering with machinery and the fascination lingered on into middle age. With this spirit of scientific in- quiry marched a very professional curiosity about his art and a certain stolid burgher pride which kept half an eye on the state of his purse and the other on his growing reputation as the 'Midlands Rembrandt.'
His personal life is ,fairly well documented, at times tragic on account of 'the indifferent and very precarious state' of his ,health, and often illuminating. He had evidently imbibed a number of Rousseauish ideas about educa- tion through his great friend Darwin, and his niece Hannah has left a delightful picture of the Wright household at Bath in the late-1770s. The children, it seems, 'could even whip" tops in the room where the pictures were arranged all round, and upon the floor.' This spirit of liberal education is reflected in his paintings, especially in An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, where two small children share the excitement of the experiment, though reduced to tears by the apparent inevitability of the bird's last fluttering gasps. It would have been unthinkable in London to depict precocious little gentlemen in such a setting, but then the subject itself would never have occurred to the average portraitist.
At first sight Mr Nicolson's extensive in- vestigations into the sources of Wright's large subject pictures may appear to have rubbed some of the gilt off his claim to originality. The mezzotints of Thomas Frye, a contem- porary candlelight painter, were known to Wright; he was obviously well acquainted with the works of the Utrecht school and a number of illustrated books were available which de- picted in some detail the various scientific instruments and phenomena he loved to in- corporate in his work. But no other painter of the time had such a grasp of the pictorial possibilities in the Industrial Revolution or managed to elevate commonplace scientific ex- periments to a level of almost religious intensity.
On his travels to Italy, a sine qua non for any aspiring painter in the eighteenth century, Wright lingered over the relics of antiquity and found them as moving as the forges and air pumps of his native Derbyshire. But what stirred his imagination most was the sight of Vesuvius.''Tis the most wonderful sight in nature,' he wrote, and it immediately confirmed his own preoccupation with the infernos of industry. On his return, he made any number of studies of Vesuvius and of two large grottoes near Salerno which had a cavernous industrial flavour. His patrons had also changed on his return, with the rather paradoxical situation that, whereas he exhibited largely in London, his most enthusiastic patrons were the new industrial families like the Wedg- woods and Arkwrights who would as happily accept a candlelight picture of an industrial subject as the more traditional portrait group by the same artist.
What Mr Nicolson has done so successfully in this study is to place Wright firmly in the bourgeois Midlands industrial society where he felt most at home, surrounded by other in- quiring minds, in touch with artistic affairs in London and winning a European reputation, but always faithful to his native Derby at the eventual cost of a total eclipse in his reputa- tion. His revaluation is long overdue, as indeed is the cleaning of his masterpieces in public galleries.
Richard Wilson's sketchbook is a dis- appointing affair, though an elegant produc- tion. The main interest attached to it lies in its existence in an unmutilated form, though few of the drawings would have merited re- moval in the past. More interesting is Denys Sutton's long essay to accompany the plates, which gives an excellent picture of the curi- ously involved interactions of painters, archae- ologists and dealers in eighteenth century Rome. The drawings echo the sketches of a hundred other artists on the grand tour and add very little to our knowledge or apprecia- tion of Wilson.
Festschrifts are usually fairly obscurantist and of little interest to anyone but the recipient. The essays collected for Dr Pevsner under the title Concerning Architecture are not just an album amicorum but a very good indication of the present state of architectural history, a' subject still in its infancy in many ways. Most of the essays are linked by a common theme
of architectural criticism, ranging from atti- tudes to Elizabethan architecture, French opinion of Wren in the eighteenth century, apologists for the Gothic Revival, through the criticism of the nineteenth century journals up to 'Architectural Polemic, 1945-65,' a spirited piece of polemic itself, by Reyner Banham. It is a spicy collection which should interest not :-only the specialist but the general reader.
Previous page
