A Philosopher by Lamplight

Joseph Wright showed this in London in 1769, in the years when he was making his name with pictures lit by a single flame. A hermit sits in a cave, bent over a lamp, studying a heap of human bones, while two pilgrims with shells pinned to their caps come up out of the dark to look. It reads as a scene of old religious retreat, but the hermit is really doing something the age around Wright cared about deeply, examining, measuring, trying to know. He was working close to the men of Enlightenment Derby, the makers and experimenters who met to talk science, and the same curiosity turns up in his more famous candlelit pictures of an air pump and an orrery. The single lamp does the whole job here, pulling the skull and the bones out of blackness and leaving the rest of the cave to guess at.