Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’ 1734–1797
NG 725 
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

1768

Oil on canvas, 183 × 244 cm (72 × 96 in.)

Inscribed Jo^s. Wright Pinx^t 1768 across the centre of the back of the canvas

Provenance

Purchased from the artist for £200 by Dr Benjamin Bates,¹ by whom given or bequeathed to Walter Tyrrell; Edward Tyrrell, by whom offered (as ‘the property of a gentleman’) at Christie’s, 8 July 1854 (163), bt in; presented by Edward Tyrrell to the National Gallery 1863.

Exhibited

SA 1768 (193), and in its special exhibition in September 1768 in honour of the King of Denmark (131); Derby, Corporation Art Gallery, Wright of Derby Bicentenary Exhibition, 1934 (36); Derby Art Gallery and Leicester Art Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Joseph Wright ARA , 1947 (36); Washington, National Gallery of Art, The Eye of Thomas Jefferson, 1976 (109, with detail repr. pp. 44–5); Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, 1700‐tal: Tanke och form i rokokon, 1979–80 (128, detail p. 18); Tate Gallery; Paris, Grand Palais; and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wright of Derby, 1990 (21).

On long loan to Derby Art Gallery 1912–47 , and while there, transferred in 1929 to the Tate Gallery; at the Tate Gallery 1947–71 and 1972–86 (apart from three months November 1982–January 1983, when it returned to the National Gallery in exchange for the loan of NG 6196 and NG 6197 to the Richard Wilson exhibition at the Tate Gallery).

Literature

Richard and Samuel Redgrave, A Century of British Painters, 1866, London 1947 edn, pp. 107–8; F.W. Shurlock, ‘The Scientific Pictures of Joseph Wright’, Science Progress, 1923, pp. 432–8; Waterhouse 1953, p. 192; Eric Robinson, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby: the Philosopher’s Painter’, Burlington Magazine, c. 1958, p. 214; Nicolson 1968, cat. no. 192, pp. 43–6, 104–5, 112–14, 192, plate 58, with details figs. 47, 49; Werner Busch, Joseph Wright of Derby. Das Experiment mit der Luftpumpe. Eine Heilige Allianz zwischen Wissenschaft und Religion, Frankfurt am Main 1986, passim; William Schupbach, Ά Select Iconography of Animal Experiment’, in ed. Nicholas A. Rupke, Vivisection in Historical Perspective, London 1987, pp. 340–7; ed. Pierre‐Marc de Biasi, Gustave Flaubert: Carnets du Travail, Paris 1988, p. 350; Judy Egerton, Wright of Derby, exh. cat., Tate Gallery 1990, cat. no. 21, plate 21, pp. 58–61, and see also in this exh. cat. (i) David Fraser, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby and the Lunar Society’, pp. 19–20, and (ii) Tim Clayton, ‘A Catalogue of the Engraved Works of Wright of Derby’, cat. no. P2, p. 153, repr.; David H. Solkin, Painting for Money, New Haven and London 1993, pp. 225–39; Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science, Cambridge, Mass., and London 1994, pp. 99,102; Christopher Wright, Masters of Candlelight, Landshut 1995, pp. 114–15, detail p. 115.

Technical Notes

Cleaned in 1974. In good condition, though the darker paint suffers slightly from a fine craquelure which exposes the light ground. Many minor alterations in the composition show through the top layer of the paint, particularly in the figures of the lecturer and his young assistant on the right, where two tassels, or possibly an epaulette, are visible on the shoulder.

Discussion

When the Austrian traveller Count Karl von Zinzendorf visited the Society of Artists exhibition in London in the spring of 1768, he found only one picture worth noting in his journal, 29 April 1768: ‘Il y a un tableau d’une Expérience avec la machine pneumatique, qui se fait de nuit, qui est très beau.’² The reviewer for the Gazetteer on 23 May was even more impressed by Wright’s Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (193 in the exhibition), writing: ‘Mr Wright, of Derby, is a very great and uncommon genius in a peculiar way. Nothing can be better understood or more freely represented, than the effect of candle‐light diffused through his great picture.’

The exhibition of The Orrery in 1766 and The Air Pump in 1768 marked Wright out as a ‘singular’ (or, in the purest sense of the Gazetteer reviewer’s word, ‘peculiar’) artist. These pictures fitted into none of the generally accepted categories of British art. They were too serious to be conversation pieces, and too modern to be history paintings. Their subjects were not sanctioned by literature; nor did they have the slightly saccharine charm of, for instance, Charles‐Amédée‐Philippe van Loo’s The Magic Lantern of 1764³ (fig. 1). Wright’s Orrery and Air Pump fell, rather, into the category recognised in France as le genre sérieux.

Wright did not invent the idea of ‘candle‐light diffused’ in paintings. Italian, Dutch, Netherlandish and French painters had all produced works in which candlelight, whether its [page 335]source is seen or unseen, throws chiaroscuro effects on faces, gestures, objects and fabrics.⁴ Examples within the National Gallery alone include Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus, 1601 (NG 172), Gerrit van Honthorst’s Christ before the High Priest, 1617 (NG 3679), Hendrick ter Brugghen’s The Concert of about 1626 (NG 6483) and Godfried Schalken’s Candlelight Scene: A Man offering a Gold Chain and Coins to a Girl seated on a Bed, of about 1665–70 (NG 999). Nicolson has argued that Wright has strong affinities with the Utrecht School;⁵ and so he has, but he can have known only those works which were engraved,⁶ or which may by then have been in English collections. Wright did not go abroad until 1773, and did not travel beyond Italy. The ‘candlelight’ painter whose works he is most likely to have seen at first hand is Godfried Schalken (1643–1706), who had spent some years working in England and whose works remained popular with English collectors.⁷ Some of them were much copied; Christopher Wright notes that the Boy blowing on a Firebrand (at Althorp probably by about 1700, and now in the National Gallery of Scotland) was copied around 1750 by William Shipley,⁸ founder of an art school and (in 1754) of the Society of Arts, whom Wright of Derby would have known.

But Nicolson also observed that ‘the only contemporary candlelight painter who we can be sure influenced Wright’s genre scenes was Thomas Frye’ (adding that Frye should ‘join the Utrecht School as the chief progenitor of the mode Wright made famous’).⁹ Thomas Frye (1710–62),¹⁰ portraitist and co‐founder of the Bow porcelain factory, drew and himself engraved in mezzotint two series of large Heads, available in printsellers’ shops in 1760–1, which were startlingly different from the endless engraved portraits of the great, the good and the notorious produced in Britain. Frye’s Heads are not portraits, nor did they carry titles; they are studies in different aspects of contemplation, or stronger emotions such as fear, in the manner of Piazzetta. They inhabit a candlelit world, and what we see of their dress suggests an element of fantasy. Frye’s mezzotint technique dramatised their chiaroscuro effects in a manner which must have appealed powerfully to Wright. Nicolson reproduces several of them: in a telling sequence, he demonstrates Wright’s borrowings from Frye’s so‐called ‘Portrait of a Man seen in profile’ both for the figure of a young draughtsman in An Academy by Lamplight and for the figure of the young boy who peers upwards to watch the experiment in The Air Pump. In homage to Nicolson, and in the knowledge that nothing else would make his point so well, his sequence of illustrations is reproduced here (figs. 2–4 (a, b, c) ).

During the 1760s Wright painted a series of ‘candlelight’ pictures of increasing complexity. The first is probably A Girl reading a Letter by Candlelight, with a Young Man peering over her Shoulder, of about 1760–2. The subject is not new; but Wright’s handling of the effects of light thrown upwards by candlelight on the girl’s face – and, still more interestingly, on [page 336]the more shadowy face of the man behind her – showed an ability to deploy chiaroscuro to dramatic effect which was new in British art.¹¹ Apart from Thomas Frye, only a few of Wright’s contemporaries showed an interest in such effects. George Romney (1734–1802) painted two small and fairly sketchy ‘candlelights’ in 1761 to include in a lottery exhibition held in Kendal to help finance his move to London,¹² but does not seem to have returned to ‘candlelights’. Henry Morland ( c. 1719–97) painted (repetitively) slightly coquettish ‘candlelights’ of pretty girls of the lower classes, for which there were Dutch precedents; the first to be exhibited, in 1764, was A Ballad Singer, which interested Horace Walpole sufficiently for him to note ‘singing by the light of a paper candle, in a paper Lanthorn, which she holds in her right hand’.¹³ The almost unknown John Foldsone (fl. 1769–84) exhibited ‘A candlelight’ in 1769; this may have been the subject engraved in 1771 as Female Lucubration (a maidservant with a candle, who may be lighting the way to more than the bookshelf).¹⁴ More interesting than these (but rather later) is Richard Morton Paye’s Self Portrait of the Artist engraving, exhibited in 1783, for whose rediscovery we must thank Alastair Laing.¹⁵

Wright was essentially a serious‐minded artist. While Morland and Foldsone used candlelight to hint at the availability of pretty girls, Wright sought ways of using candlelight to suggest the very different, studious excitement to be found in the acquisition of knowledge. There is a parallel here with Stubbs, who showed that enamel painting could be used for serious subjects, rather than (as Richard Cosway and others used it) for ‘loose and amorous’ scenes.¹⁶ The first picture which Wright exhibited in London (in 1765, at the Society of Artists) was a ‘candlelight’: Three Persons viewing the Gladiator by Candle‐light (fig. 5),¹⁷ in which three men study a copy of one of the most famous works of antiquity, the Borghese Gladiator. The mood is studious and reverent. But not all Wright’s candlelights were to be so solemn. Nicolson rightly calls Two Boys fighting over a Bladder ‘the most ferocious picture in Wright’s oeuvre’,¹⁸ while Two Girls dressing a Kitten by Candlelight depicts ‘play’ of a different kind.¹⁹

In 1766 Wright exhibited A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in place of the Sun (fig. 6).²⁰ A philosopher (a term then used of a person learned in any science) expounds the movement of the planets round the sun; the beautiful ellipses of the orrery demonstrate it. The audience is made up of seven people of different ages, levels of knowledge and sex. Lectures upon the orrery and other scientific matters became increasingly popular. Sir Richard Steele, writing in 1713, particularly praised the orrery because it ‘administers the Pleasures of Science to anyone’.²¹ The originality in Wright’s painting of the Orrery lies in his perception that a painting on a commanding scale could be made out of a scene which communicates ‘the Pleasures of Science’ to men, women and children of different levels of knowledge.

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, exhibited two years later, is larger than The Orrery and, chiefly because of the compelling figure of the lecturer, rather more theatrical. The experiment was by no means new in 1768; what is new is Wright’s ability to make a painting of the impact of the experiment on ordinary people. The air pump itself, an instrument which can create a vacuum in a receiver or container by expelling all the air from it, had been invented over a century before Wright’s picture (by Otto von Guericke, at [page 337]Magdeburg in 1650). Experiments were carried out by scientists all over Europe; among them was Constantijn Huygens, ambassador and ‘philosopher’, whose portrait by Thomas de Keyser in the National Gallery (NG 212) is justly well‐known, and who, with Nicolas Papin, contributed a paper on the distillation of spirits of the air pump to the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1675.²² The air pump was used for various experiments in pneumatic physics, to demonstrate the weight, pressure and elasticity of air.²³ It was first used for animal experiments in 1659, by Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, who carried out experiments placing larks, sparrows, mice, frogs, kittens etc. in a receiver from which air was pumped out, with varying results (in many cases, death) caused by ‘impeded respiration’. By the time Wright painted his picture, the air pump had become ‘a common item in cabinets which included instruments of experimental philosophy’.²⁴ William Constable of Burton Constable in Yorkshire bought his (a ‘neat double barrell Air Pump with all ye usual apparatus’) from the instrument maker Benjamin Cole, Fleet Street, for £21 in 1757.²⁵ By the 1760s, engravings of scientific equipment had been published in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, with tiny figures or letters keyed to learned exposition. But the public at large probably encountered ‘science’ only in the form of demonstrations by travelling lecturers,²⁶ usually in town halls, but sometimes, as both The Orrery and The Air Pump suggest, privately, and by invitation.

One of the most solidly professional of the travelling lecturers was James Ferguson FRS, the London‐based maker of astronomical and other scientific instruments, who had lectured on ‘Popular Astronomy’ in London and the provinces since 1749.²⁷ In about 1760 he decided that he would do better financially to extend the range of his lectures and to organise them into courses, inviting subscribers at one guinea each per course; minimum audience not less than twenty in London, not less than thirty within ten miles of London, and not less than sixty subscribers within a hundred miles of London.²⁸ The courses consisted of twelve lectures on ‘the most interesting parts of Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Electricity and Astronomy’.²⁹ Ferguson travelled (presumably by wagon) with his own apparatus – at least fifty different pieces, including an air pump, an armillary sphere, an orrery and much other equipment. He gave his courses in various provincial towns – Bath, Liverpool, Newcastle among them. In 1762, on a Midlands tour, he gave them in Derby.³⁰

Whether Wright attended them is not known; the lectures were fairly elementary, and he had enough scientific friends among members of the Lunar Society³¹ to have become familiar with ‘apparatus’ such as the orrery and the air pump and their workings. Far more novel in the 1760s were demonstrations with electricity, such as Charles‐Nicolas Cochin depicts in Expériences d’électricité (fig. 7). But Wright’s purpose in painting The Air Pump was not to depict a novel experiment, but to celebrate a new appetite for learning. If he attended Ferguson’s lectures, he is likely to have been as interested in the reactions of the audience as in the content of the lectures.

The air pump was the focal point of any lecture on pneumatics. The lecturer often began by taking a pair of Magdeburg hemispheres – in Wright’s Air Pump, these are the two small linked objects lying on the table near the glass phial of murky liquid – and demonstrating that if the air between them is completely pumped out they become inseparable. Experiments with liquids might follow. But the culminating point was always a demonstration of the potentially lethal effects of depriving living creatures of air. It was possible to demonstrate this in either of two ways: by simulation, placing in the glass receiver a bladder or ‘lungs‐glass’ which could be seen to inflate with air or collapse without it, thereby feigning death; or by placing within the receiver a living creature which would sustain life (increasingly painfully) so long as some air was left in the receiver for it to breathe; the lecturer then enjoyed the god‐like power of either expelling air completely and thus killing the creature, or quickly admitting air and thus reviving it. Lecturers being what they are, most chose the more sensational demonstration on a living creature. Schupbach quotes a dialogue from Benjamin Martin’s The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, 1755;³² alas, extracts only can be given here. The young gentleman, dignified by the name of Cleonicus, is bent on demonstrating the air pump to his young and tender‐hearted sister Euphrosyne.
Euphrosyne.  See here comes John, with a lovely, young Rabbit. I hope that tender Creature is not to be sacrificed for my Sake. –
Cleonicus.  You are like all the Rest of your Sex. – You think it Cruelty to attempt the Life of a large Animal, but are quite regardless of the Destruction of those which expire under your Feet in every walk of Pleasure you take. – …But to mitigate your Concern, I shall only show, in this Experiment, that the poor Creature does really depend upon the Air for Life; and after that, I shall put it into your Hands, as well as you see it now. – Here, John, put the Rabbit under the Glass. – And now, my good Euphrosyne, have a good Heart, and look on; for turning away your Face will boot the Animal nothing. – See, upon exhausting [the receiver], how uneasy it appears. – As the air is more rarefied, the Animal is rendered more thoughtful of its unlucky Situation, and seeks in vain to extricate himself. – He leaps and jumps about. – A Vertigo seizes his brain. – He falls, and is just upon expiring. – But I turn the Ventpiece, and let in the Air by Degrees. – You see him begin to heave, and pant. – At length he rouzes up, opens his Eyes, and wildly stares about him. – I take off the receiver, and shall now deliver it as recovered from the Dead.
Euphrosyne.  Poor innocent creature! … Thou shalt always be my darling Rabbit, as by thee, I have been obliged to learn how necessary the Air is for animal Life, and Respiration.

Unlike Cleonicus, Ferguson believed that to experiment with a living creature in the air pump container ‘is too shocking to every spectator who has the least degree of humanity’.³³ He preferred to simulate death by using the bladder or lungs‐[page 339]glass, and almost certainly would have done so when lecturing on pneumatics in Derby. Ferguson no doubt gave a thoroughly sound lecture; but his use of a bladder to simulate a life at risk could hardly have inspired the high pictorial drama of Wright’s picture.

Wright’s choice of a ‘living creature’ as the subject of his Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump is likely to have been at least partly inspired by the following lines in The Wanderer, a long poem by Richard Savage:
So in some Engine, that denies a Vent,
If unrespiring is some Creature pent,
It sickens, droops, and pants, and gasps for Breath,
Sad o’er the Sight swim shad’wy Mists of Death;
If then kind Air pours pow’rful in again,
New Heats, new Pulses quicken ev’ry Vein,
From the clear’d, lifted, life‐rekindled Eye,
Dispers’d, the dark and dampy Vapours fly.Richard Savage (d. 1743),³⁴ Dr Johnson’s early friend, had himself been reprieved from sentence of death; tried for murdering a stranger in a tavern, he was convicted and taken to the condemned cells at Newgate, but received a royal pardon. The Wanderer was first published in 1729, the year following his reprieve.³⁵ At some point he must, surely, have witnessed an experiment on ‘some Creature’ in an air pump, whose survival of the ordeal inspired his image of ‘life‐rekindled’. Wright had a taste for literature, encouraged by his friend and patron, the poet William Hayley; he took several of his subjects from near‐contemporary verse,³⁶ as well as from Shakespeare and Milton.

In Wright’s first rough sketch for a picture of The Air Pump (fig. 8),³⁷ the apparatus itself is at the side of the picture; the lecturer is a patient, unassertive figure and the bird he has placed in the receiver is a fairly inconspicuous common or garden songbird – a lark or a thrush – such as was normally used in this experiment. His big picture is altogether more dramatic. On the table, we see the rim of a brass candlestick. The candle it holds is the only source of light in this picture; but it is concealed from us by a large rounded glass, within which (as Schupbach noted) there appears to be a carious [page 340]human skull.³⁸ As Schupbach observes, ‘Skull and candle are traditional companions in iconography, the candle demonstrating the consuming passage of time, the skull its effect’; as emblems of mortality, they remind us that death is inevitable, and imply that the bird will die if deprived of air.³⁹ If this is what Wright intended, he has strangely underplayed the role of the skull, perhaps because he does not wish to distract attention from his central image. Instead of the usual hollow‐eyed, nose‐destroyed, starkly recognisable skull of traditional vanitas paintings, he shows only part of a carious (diseased) skull, seen from behind, and lacking the mandible or lower jaw.⁴⁰ His chief reason for placing it in the glass beaker may have been to add to the concealment of the candle behind it. It remained unrecognised as a skull for two centuries before Schupbach identified it.

The experiment Wright depicts is evidently taking place in a private house. Probably the man next to the lecturer, pointing upwards, is the host: but who is who hardly matters compared with the fact that the audience is made up of both sexes and of people of widely differing ages. A long tradition identifies the couple on the left as Thomas Coltman and Mary Barlow, both then living in Derby and both friends of the artist; they were to marry in 1769, and sit to Wright for the double portrait Mr and Mrs Coltman (NG 6496, pp. 344–9). Flaubert saw them as lovers. He saw the Air Pump when he was in London in 1865–6, noting in his journal: ‘Wright: Expérience de la machine pneumatique. Effet de nuit. Deux amoureux dans un coin, charmants. Le vieux (à longs cheveux) qui montre l’oiseau sous le verre. Petite fille qui pleure. Charmant de naïveté et de profondeur.’ The spectators range in age from the two little girls on the right – the elder a pure ‘Euphrosyne’, whose (?) father may well be saying to her ‘Have a good Heart, and look on; for turning away your Face will boot the Animal nothing’. The oldest is the man seated on the right, not watching the experiment but seemingly sunk in thought. This figure is closely derived, as Michael Wynne has shown,⁴¹ from a pastel drawing by Frye of An Old Man leaning on a Staff, of about 1760; but Wright has lowered the man’s head, so that his gaze seems to centre on the candle and the skull, as if brooding on their implications.

The most detached spectator is the man partly turned away from us, holding a stop‐watch with which to time the convulsions of the ‘subject’. The only person present who watches the experiment with genuine curiosity is the boy next to him, leaning forwards, and, as Kate Atkinson recently observed, ‘craning his neck to see better, utterly absorbed by his observation’ (see fig. 3).⁴²

Within the glass receiver, Wright depicts a white cockatoo, a rare bird in the Midlands in the 1760s, and one whose life would never in reality have been risked in an experiment such as this:⁴³ but Wright had already painted a white cockatoo in his portrait of Mr and Mrs William Chase,⁴⁴ and knew that its white plumage was just what he needed to show to dramatic advantage in the shadows of this room. As for the lecturer, Wright has transformed him into a magus with a sense of theatre, and placed him so that candlelight heightens the effect of every furrow of his brow and every curl of his silver locks. Busch 1986 sees precedents in an early Netherlandish type of painting of the Holy Trinity – where God the Father points upwards towards the dove of the Holy Spirit, while Christ extends a hand towards the people – in Wright’s central group of the lecturer, the bird and the man pointing upwards.⁴⁵

The lecturer’s magnetic expression illustrates only the most obvious of the effects which Wright achieved in this, the most ambitious of all his ‘candlelights’. Illumined faces seen in close‐up, angled necks such as Mary Barlow’s in her softly dark, sinuously stranded jet necklace, profiles such as the young boy’s half‐hidden in shadow, these are only part of those effects. Just as interesting to Wright is what happens to colours as they recede from light. The lecturer’s showy robe – flashier than any other demonstrator wears in his scenes – can be seen immediately above the light to be of light red damask, woven with arabesques; as the eye travels upwards, further from the light, the stuff darkens to magenta. This observation of changes in colour as light recedes continues throughout the picture. One other example may be given: the young ‘Euphrosyne’ who averts her eyes from the experiment wears, like her sister, a dress of palest lilac. In the light of the candle, these dresses are pale indeed; but as the elder girl turns away from the experiment, her dress deepens from lilac to purple, and finally to black. This, perhaps, is what the Gazetteer meant when praising the effects of light ‘diffused throughout his great picture’.

Wright depicts the moment when much of the air has already been pumped out of the glass container, by means of the handle attached to the barrels encasing pistons. The bird gasps, and sinks to the bottom of the cage; but it is not yet lifeless. The lecturer’s left hand is poised on the stop‐cock at the top of the receiver; if he turns it in time, the bird will revive; if not, it will die. The lecturer seems to stare out at us as if he had god‐like power of determining life or death; but he will almost certainly have conducted this experiment before, may wish to be invited again (for a fee), knows that actual death distresses a family group like this, and is probably counting under his breath each second of risk he can take before reviving the bird.

Wright’s painting leaves us uncertain of the outcome. A boy by the window holds the cords of a birdcage, waiting for his cue; is he to lower the cage to receive the revived bird, or haul it out of sight because the bird is dead? We cannot be certain: but it should be noted that when Valentine Green engraved his mezzotint of the subject, he indicated – with a few strokes of the graver, and presumably with Wright’s sanction – a just perceptible return of air into the receiver.

Much of the power of Wright’s painting was retained in the mezzotint engraved by Valentine Green. As Tim Clayton 1990 notes, this was based on Green’s own faithful drawing, presumably made soon after the painting’s completion. The mezzotint was exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1769 [page [341]][page 342](271); the plate was promptly purchased by John Boydell, who published it for sale at fifteen shillings. Good impressions were in demand, both in Britain and on the Continent. Increasingly weak impressions continued to be printed throughout the nineteenth century.⁴⁶

In the Paris Salon of 1771, Charles‐Amédée‐Philippe van Loo (1719–95) exhibited Une Expérience physique d’un oiseau privé d’air à la machine pneumatique,⁴⁷ but this has little in common with Wright’s picture; the figures are dressed in the style of the previous century, suggesting that this was in effect a history painting, depicting the air pump while it was still a recent invention, and the vaguely aristocratic characters register distinct ennui: Diderot commented ‘Expérience où aucun des spectateurs n’est à ce qu’il fait.’⁴⁸ A decade later, probably in the early 1780s, Amédée van Loo returned to the subject, but this time very differently. He painted his own family gathered together to watch an experiment with the air pump (fig. 10),⁴⁹ with himself in the role of lecturer, Mme van Loo rather nervously clutching a pet dog (but she need not be so apprehensive, for there seems already to be some small creature in the receiver), a boy cranking the apparatus and various members of the family looking on, mostly rather urbanely. It seems likely that Amédée van Loo had seen the mezzotint after Wright’s Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, and that he adapted Wright’s idea of integrating the subject into a domestic setting.

Wright’s own image of the bird imprisoned in the glass receiver may in a sense have haunted his thoughts. After the gravely beautiful An Academy by Lamplight, exhibited the following year,⁵⁰ he painted no more ‘candlelights’, instead painting a series of ‘night pieces’, 1771–3, foreshadowed by the glimpse of a full moon riding above clouds in The Air Pump. But at the same time, he was preoccupied with subjects of captives and prisoners. He showed A Captive King (now lost) at the Society of Artists in 1773.⁵¹ Then he painted The Captive, from Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, completing one version in Rome in 1774 and another which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1778;⁵² he also painted several small prison scenes. These pictures were largely inspired by Sterne’s ‘picture’ of a man confined in a dungeon; but it may be recalled that the key passage in Sterne describes Yorick having lost his passport in Paris, joking to himself about being ‘clapp’d up into the Bastile’. Then he walks into the street, where he hears ‘a voice which I took to be of a child, which complained “it could not get out”’. He saw it was ‘a starling hung in a little cage – “I can’t get out” – “I can’t get out”, said the starling’. Thereafter Yorick could think of nothing but ‘the miseries of confinement’.

Notes