Joseph Wright of Derby

Joseph Wright lived in Derby, in the English Midlands, just as that region was turning into the workshop of the Industrial Revolution, and almost alone among painters he took the new age of science and machines as his subject. He is usually called Wright of Derby to mark the town he stayed loyal to.

His signature trick was a single hidden light. In 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump' a travelling showman pumps the air from a glass globe, a white cockatoo fluttering inside, while a lamp throws drama across the ring of watching faces, some fascinated, one child in tears. In another, a family gathers around a working model of the solar system lit from within.

Wright knew the industrialists and thinkers of his region, men who met to talk chemistry and machines, and he painted their forges glowing in the dark and travelled to Italy to paint Vesuvius erupting. He died in Derby in 1797, at 62, having painted the cotton mills of his friend Richard Arkwright standing floodlit above the river at night.