Indian Widow

Joseph Wright is the painter of candlelight, of scientists and glowing furnaces lit from within. This picture from 1783 is the opposite. A Native American woman sits alone under an open, stormy sky, keeping vigil beside the weapons of her dead husband, a chief. Wright had read a traveller's account of this custom and built the whole scene around one exposed figure against weather and distance. Behind her a volcano smokes on the horizon and lightning breaks over the sea. Wright never went to America and never saw any of this. He painted it in Derby, in the English Midlands, at a moment when British readers were fascinated by reports of faraway peoples. The full title he gave it was the widow of an Indian chief watching the arms of her deceased husband.