Underrated Midlander who introduced art to science

A major new exhibition of Joseph Wright's enlightenment masterpieces shows him to be a mysterious interpreter of light, knowledge and moral doubt

- MARK HUDSON

It’s a face that could haunt you forever: that of the long-haired scientist peering from the shadows in Joseph Wright’s 1768 masterpiece, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.

He looks out of the painting not so much at us, as beyond us – at a universe of limitless scientific possibilities, confident of his role in the betterment of humanity, despite having just killed a bird in a probably pointless scientific demonstration.

His face is seen on the posters for the National Gallery’s “Wright of Derby: From the Shadows”. And it’s blown up to wall-filling size at the entrance to this revelatory exhibition on a technically prodigious artist who is all too often underserved in accounts of British art, largely, I’ve always suspected, because of that parochial appendage to his surname, “of Derby”.

The Air Pump is reunited with Wright’s other great science-themed painting The Orrery, which shows a mechanical demonstration of the movement of the planets, for the first time in 35 years. They’re the centrepieces of a show that wants to rescue Wright from his image as a jobbing provincial painter who created the seminal images of the British scientific Enlightenment almost by accident. We’re to see Wright now not only as a singular painter of light, but an artist who “proposes moral questions about the act of looking”.