The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus

Joseph Wright of Derby worked at the edge of the English Midlands during the years its factories and furnaces were changing the country, and he loved painting the exact moment a light source flares in the dark. Here the glow is a flask of glowing phosphorus. The scene looks back a century, to a real event: in 1669 a Hamburg alchemist named Hennig Brand, boiling down large amounts of urine in search of the philosopher's stone, instead isolated a substance that shone in the dark. Wright shows the old man kneeling as if at prayer while his laboratory turns into something like a chapel. He first exhibited it in 1771 and could not sell it, reworked it in 1795, and it stayed with him unsold; it now hangs in Derby, his home town.