O Cativo

This candlelit prison scene comes from a book, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, published in 1768, in which the narrator imagines a single captive wasting away alone in a cell and counting the days on a stick. Joseph Wright of Derby, who loved a subject lit by one dramatic source, painted his first version of it in Rome in 1774, posing a model as the abandoned prisoner. The figure sits slumped in the dark, the only light falling across his face and the bare stone around him, so that despair reads almost as a physical weight pressing him down. Wright returned again to aging men left alone with their own mortality, and the captive is among the bleakest of them. The engraving made after the picture was printed in only twenty copies before the plate was destroyed.