Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent three week online course from the National Gallery on the art of Wright of Derby to compliment their exhibition on him. Matthew Morgan started in the first week by outlining the artists life and work and giving an overview of how the art market was changing at this time and how artists were reflecting the new ideas of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. He also brought in Lucy Bamford from Derby Museums Trust to discuss why Wright was known as Wright of Derby and to examine his relationship with the city. Morgan spent the next two weeks examining two aspects of Wrights work, how he reflects the rational and how he engaged the emotions. He started with the rational   discussing ideas at the time about the benefits of looking and observation and Rousseau’s ideas around learning by doing and by demonstration. He discussed the circles Wright moved in, including the Lunar Society, and whether we can consider him an Enlightenment artist. Having examined the ...

Clever exhibition at the National Gallery looking at the candlelight paintings of Wright of Derby. I'd been looking forward to this show as I love Wright of Derby's work. I'd hoped it would be bigger than this and look at his whole career including the portraits, but this was beautifully pitched to look at a specific period in his work from 1765 to 1773. The show set the work in the context of the time but I liked the fact it put the paintings front and centre. Head to the right when you go in as this takes you through the pictures first rather than getting bogged down in the exploration of some aspects of them before you are ready for that detail. I went on members' preview day and people were in awe of a of the work. The gallery's own painting of the bird in the air pump looked wonderful and it was great to see it with the Orrery painting. I loved the fact that paintings were shown with the objects they included such as an air pump and a copy of the Renaiss...

Excellent online introduction from the National Gallery to their Wright of Derby exhibition. Christine Riding led us through the main themes of the show starting with discussing the technique displayed in these works using light and dark to dramatic effect can called Tenebrism. She examined how the ideas came from Caravaggio but Wright used them in a secular context and, having not seen the work in the flash, but worked out how to do it from experimentation. She talked about the genre of works showing study by candlelight became popular and how it reflected that nighttime was seen as the time for learning feeding into ideas of refinement and dedication. This led her to examine the two main works in the show “The Orrey” and “Bird in an Air Pump” and the fashion for scientific learning. Finally she looked at how Wright’s style changed in the 1770s, still using the dramatic effects of light and dark, but focusing on working class labour such as blacksmiths and how this reflected id...

Interesting online lecture from ARTscapapes on the Enlightenment potter Josiah Wedgewood. Tristram Hunt, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and x-MP for Stoke Central, talked us through the life and innovations of Wedgewood based on the biography he has recently published. I’d missed seeing Hunt talk at Charleston Farmhouse so I was delighted to get another opportunity to hear him. In fact the friend who went to the Charleston talk bought me a signed copy of the book as a Christmas present. Hunt talked us though many of Wedgewood’s innovations from cream ware through to Jasperware in ceramics, his new marketing techniques, his development of canals and his introduction of a production line to the ceramic industry. He also looked at his radical politics from support for the American and French revolutions but more importantly his campaigning for abolition of the slave-trade in particular popularising the “Am I Not a Man and Brother” image designed by William Hackwood. He ...

Interesting online lecture by Stella Grace Lyons looking at the life and work of Joseph Wright of Derby. Lyons told the story of Wrights work through a series of his best known works. Seen as an artist of the Enlightenment, Wright was fascinated by the contrast of light and dark and was best known for his candlelit pictures of contemporary scientific and industrial scenes, most famous of which is the National Gallery’s “Experiment on an Bird in an Air Pump” which I love. She introduced me to works I didn’t know such as “The Alchymist” from 1771 which shows an alchemist’s discovery of phosphorus. He sinks to his knees before the experiment in wonder as the moon, a reference to the Lunar Society, shines thought the window. Other examples she used included the beautiful “Iron Forge”, a scene partly celebrating the liberation from hard physical labour and prosperity brought by the introduction of machinery to an iron foundry, and “A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at an Orrery” which i...

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at how artists and scientists explore new ideas. I’d been looking for an exhibition like this for a while with the art of the Enlightenment at the heart of it. The show told 20 stories over four themes to highlight interactions between scientists and artists and how they inspired each other both then and over the centuries since. From the first large picture by Joseph Wright of Derby I was hooked. The first section looked at sociable science and explained the ideas of the Enlightenment via the Wright of Derby picture. It also had a fascinating section on the invention of artificial dyes in the Victorian era and the reaction against them from artists and designers. All art types were covered so a section on the invention of artificial fibres used the film “The Man in the White Suit” as its artistic example. It also looked at how Polaroid partnered with Ansel Adams to promote its cameras. My favourite section, Troubled H...

Excellent study morning at the National Gallery focusing on Wright of Derby’s picture “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” led by Jacqui Anselm. We began by looking at the picture in the gallery but went a long way round so we could look at other narrative pictures and think and how they told a story. I have done a few study mornings with Jacqui now and she is great at making you look at the picture carefully and think about the position of the people and what they are looking at. We talked about lots of things including the ages of the people in the picture and the light sources. Back in the seminar room we discussed how this picture fitted Enlightenment thinking and the idea of “Learning through Looking”. We looked at the fashion for scientific experiments in the home and talked about whether we thought the main protagonist was a travelling showman or the master of the house. We also talked about whether the picture was saying that the laws of God gone out of the wi...