Une expérience sur un oiseau dans la machine pneumatique

In the 1760s, when Wright painted this, science was becoming a kind of public entertainment. Travelling lecturers moved from town to town giving demonstrations in people's homes, and one of the crowd-pleasers was the air pump. You put a small animal under a glass dome and slowly pumped the air out, so everyone could watch what the loss of air did to a living thing. That is the moment Wright caught. A white cockatoo is inside the flask, wings drooping, and the man running the experiment has his hand on the valve. He can let the air back in and save the bird, or not, and he is looking straight out at us as if the decision were ours. Around the table the reactions differ. Two girls can't bear to look. A young couple only have eyes for each other. An old man just stares, thinking. Wright treated a science demonstration with the seriousness usually kept for a religious painting, lit by a single hidden candle. The National Gallery in London has had it since 1863.