Joseph Wright (September 3, 1734 - August 29, 1797), styled Wright of Derby, was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution. He trained in the London studio of the fashionable and successful artist Thomas Hudson where he spent almost three years. Wright made attempts to establish his practice as an artist in Liverpool, and also in Bath. He regularly exhibited his paintings at the Royal Society of Arts in London. However, it was Derby where the artist lived and worked for most of his life. He became known as Wright of Derby. Like many artists of his time, he travelled to Italy in 1773-1774. He drew and painted ancient ruins, copied classical statues and saw the spectacular fireworks accompanying the Carnival in Rome.
In Naples he witnessed an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which provided him with the inspiration for several dozen paintings depicting the dramatic effects of fire and darkness. He explored the picturesque caverns and grottoes around the shores of the bay of Naples. Impressions of Italian nature, “beautiful and uncommon, with an atmosphere so pure and clear” are reflected in many of his subsequent works. Success as a portrait painter made money for Wright, but it was his scientific and industrial paintings, full of dramatic contrasts of light and darkness, which distinguished him from other contemporary artists and assured his unique position in British Art. Wright’s residence in Derby, although provincial, turned out to be a lucky one, because it was here that the Industrial Revolution was at most visual, through blacksmith shops, glass and pottery cones, factories, new machines and engines. His pictures of technological subjects, partly inspired by the Dutch followers of Caravaggio, date from 1763 to 1773; the most famous are The Air Pump (1768) and The Orrery (c. 1763-65). Wright was also noted for his portraits of English Midlands industrialists and intellectuals.
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