Stop and Look – Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, 1768

“Wright of Derby” was thus known in his own time because he was not part of the London art establishment. He was a local man, a provincial, and his career was centred on the life and society of the English Midlands. But there was nothing marginal about that life. It was in those Midland counties that the Industrial Revolution was happening, one of the most world-changing sequences of events in human history.

Wright knew many of the leading figures, the scientists and industrialists, responsible for the thinking and experimentation that drove the whole process. He was a portrait and landscape painter, but also tackled the great themes of the day, even though they were not picture-worthy, or “picturesque” by the criteria of the time.  This large picture has some claim to be the most important painting of the whole eighteenth century. In its subtle exploration of the theme of scientific advance, together with its delicate presentation of human feelings in that context, it’s both wide-ranging and profound.

It’s also a fine example of one of Wright’s specialities – chiaroscuro, the exploitation of strong contrasts of light and dark.  The technique was effective in views of Vesuvius erupting at night, but especially suitable to industrial and scientific subjects – a forge, a furnace or a planetarium (Orrery). Here there is a contrast between the light of the moon seen through the window on the right and the brilliant candle-light, seen refracted through a vase of water on the table, by which the lecturer is conducting his demonstration. Interestingly, Wright presents him not as a modern scientist but as some kind of conjuror, performing a magic trick. Indeed, what we see is not a new “experiment” but the demonstration, for entertainment and instruction, of a phenomenon that had been known about since the seventeenth century. The mechanism by which the white cockatoo in the glass receiver is deprived of oxygen is not magic: it’s a scientific process.

A process that affects the audience in different ways: the dispassionately interested gentlemen, the apprehensive and unhappy girls. It’s also a moral exemplar: a memento mori. Immediately below the receiver in which the bird flutters is a glass jar containing a human skull. The skull and the candle are both long-established symbols of mortality, of the inevitability of death. The old man looking at it so intently on the right is perhaps the one member of the group who sees the event in these terms.

There is an element of narrative tension here too. What we aren’t told is how the experiment will end: will the lecturer restore the supply of air to the receiver and so save the life of the bird, or will he kill it by shutting the air off altogether? In fact, this isn’t just the account of a scientific lecture: it’s a story in paint, with characters exemplifying different human responses to the situation – a visual parallel to the literary achievements of the great novelists of the same period. Laurence Sterne’s last novel, A Sentimental Journey, was published in 1768, the year that Wright exhibited this picture at the Society of Artists in London.