Two Girls Dressing a Kitten by Candlelight

Joseph Wright of Derby was the painter of the English Enlightenment, famous for candlelit scenes of experiments and orreries where a single flame lights up faces in the dark. Around 1768 he turned that same trick on a small domestic scene. Two well-dressed girls have dropped their doll and are busy dressing the family kitten instead, its face poking out unhappily as they fuss over it, all lit by one hidden candle that catches their cheeks and the cat's fur. It is a slighter subject than his machines and his forges, made partly to show off the lighting he had made his signature. The picture hangs at Kenwood House in London, where it has become the most popular painting in the room.