Illuminating the dark: Painting candlelight and chiaroscuro
- Friday, 27 February 2026
- Friday, 6 March 2026
Enrol
| Standard: | £360 |
| Concessions: | £324 |
Please book a ticket to attend this course which will take place in the Roden Centre for Creative Learning.
Tickets include entry to the National Gallery. Please arrive in good time to access the building and find the event.
Bookings close 10 minutes before the event begins.
Concessions are for full-time students, jobseekers, and disabled adults.
This event is open for Members priority booking until Sunday, November 23, 2025.
About
Discover how artists from Caravaggio to Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’ captured the drama of candlelight and shadow in this two-day practical course combining drawing and oil painting.
Across two sessions, you’ll investigate how artists such as Caravaggio, Gerrit van Honthorst and Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’ used chiaroscuro and tenebrism to heighten emotion, model form and create luminous and atmospheric scenes emerging from darkness.
Guided by artist and educator Jo Conybeare, you’ll experiment with tonal contrast, dark grounds and layered glazes to understand how artists have used light not only as illumination, but as a tool for storytelling and drama. Drawing directly from paintings in the Gallery and in ‘Wright of Derby: From the Shadows’ as well as from still-life arrangements lit by candlelight in the Clore Art Studio, you’ll study how light defines space, surface and atmosphere.
This course is suitable for artists of all levels. All materials are provided, and you can take your artworks home with you. Handouts with extra resources are also provided. All sessions take place onsite in our state-of-the-art Clore Art Studio in our Roden Centre for Creative Learning.
Illuminating the dark: Painting candlelight and chiaroscuro
The first session focuses on the foundations of chiaroscuro through drawing. Working from lit still-life compositions, you’ll use ink, charcoal and pastel to explore how light emerges from deep shadow. Through short studies and longer exercises, you’ll examine the expressive role of tenebrism, and experiment with creating depth and tension through tonal contrast. We’ll look closely at the dramatic lighting and compositional structures of Caravaggio and Honthorst in the Gallery to inform your own studies. We will also look at a variety of lighting styles to see how it changes your still-life compositions.
Illuminating the dark: Painting candlelight and chiaroscuro
Building on your drawings, the second session moves into oil painting. Beginning with a dark ground, you’ll work from shadow into light using traditional techniques drawn from Baroque practice and adapted by Wright of Derby. Through layering, you’ll create still-life compositions that balance the solidity of form with the atmospheric shimmer of candlelight. This session will include a visit to ‘Wright of Derby: From the Shadows’ exhibition for inspiration and a better understand of his painting of candlelight.
Your tutor
Joanna Conybeare is an artist and Gallery Educator at the National Gallery. She has led multiple adult courses and has worked in Primary and Secondary schools in London and the south coast as a teacher and subject lead for Art and Design. In her own artistic practice, she uses clay, porcelain and terracotta to explore the figure, enjoying the immediacy of the material that enables her to ‘draw’ three-dimensionally.