Derby Museum and Art Gallery - Significance of Joseph Wright's Paintings

Significance of Joseph Wright's Paintings

These factual paintings are considered to have metaphorical meaning too, the bursting into light of the phosphorus in front of a praying figure signifying the problematic transition from faith to scientific understanding and enlightenment, and the various expressions on the figures around the bird in the airpump indicating concern over the possible inhumanity of the coming age of science. These paintings represent a high point in scientific enquiry which began the undermining of the power of religion in Western societies. Some ten years later scientists worldwide would find themselves persecuted, or even put to death in the backlash to the French Revolution of 1789, itself the culmination of enlightenment thinking. Joseph Priestley, member of the Lunar Society and discoverer of oxygen would flee Britain after his laboratory in Birmingham was smashed and his house burned down in the Birmingham riots of 1791, by a mob objecting to his outspoken support for the French Revolution; and his colleague Lavoisier in France would be executed at the guillotine. The politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), tied natural philosophers, and specifically Priestley, to the French Revolution, writing that radicals who supported science in Britain "considered man in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump". In the light of this comment, Wright's painting of the bird in the air pump, completed over twenty years earlier, seems particularly prescient.

It was against this background that Charles Darwin, grandson of the Derby man and lunar society member, Erasmus, would re-awaken the conflict between science and religious belief once again half a century later, with the publication of his book The Origin of Species in 1859.

Because of this web of connections related to science, and the tensions it created which were so subtly illustrated by the art of the painter Joseph Wright of Derby; Derby Museum and Art Gallery, far from being just a collection of fine paintings as the casual visitor might imagine, is significant for being in a place that some would see as having a very significant role in the birth of modern science and industry worldwide. Birmingham, with its science and industry, has been described as the 'silicon valley' of the eighteenth century.

Erasmus Darwin has only a small display. Herbert Spencer, friend of Charles Darwin, and originator of the phase "the survival of the fittest", who was born in Derby, and has been described as the founder of sociology does not appear to be mentioned at all.