An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
Catalogue entry
Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’ 1734–1797
NG 725
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
2000
,Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).
Oil on canvas, 183 × 244 cm (72 × 96 in.)
Inscribed Jos. Wright Pinxt 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).
[page 333][page 334]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
[page 338]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
1. See Wright’s Account Book (coll. Derby Art Gallery): the picture is twice listed, under ‘Candlelight pictures’, p. 35, as ‘The Air Pump – 210’ and again, under the same heading but now paid for, as ‘The Air Pump Pd 200’; elsewhere in the Account Book is a note that Dr Bates paid for it in instalments. Dr Benjamin Bates, physician, of Little Missenden, Bucks, and friend of Dr Erasmus Darwin, had already bought Wright’s Three Persons viewing the Gladiator in 1765, for £40 (he also bought Wright’s ‘Galen’, a picture about which nothing is now known: see Nicolson 1968, p. 236). Bates was also the patron of John Hamilton Mortimer and Thomas Jones, see John Sunderland, ‘John Hamilton Mortimer: His Life and Works’, Walpole Society 1986, vol. LII, 1988, under cat. no. 85: The Progress of Vice, four paintings of 1774 painted for Dr Bates, of which two survive; and ed. A.P. Oppé, ‘Memoirs of Thomas Jones’, Walpole Society 1946–48, XXXII, 1951, pp. 33–5, 38. (Back to text.)
2. Quoted by Robinson 1958, p. 214. (Back to text.)
3. Coll. NGA , Washington (880), with a companion picture, Soap Bubbles (881). (Back to text.)
4. See in particular Benedict Nicolson, ‘Artificial Light in Painting in the 17th Century’, text of a lecture given in the 1970s, published in ed. L. Vertova, Caravaggism in Europe, Turin 1979, vol. I, pp. 258. See also Wright 1995, passim , including 75 ills, in colour. (Back to text.)
5. Nicolson 1968, pp. 39–40; and see p. 47: ‘When we come to discuss Wright’s genre scenes, it will be to Honthorst and Terbrugghen to whom we shall most often refer.’ (Back to text.)
6. The Caravaggio Supper at Emmaus was engraved by Pierre Fatoure in 1629. The Honthorst (NG 3679) was engraved by Pietro Fontana (1762–1837), i.e. too late to have influenced Wright’s candlelights. No engraving of the Schalken (NG 999) is recorded in MacLaren/Brown 1991. (Back to text.)
7. See Andrew W. Moore, Dutch and Flemish Painting in Norfolk, exh. cat., Norfolk Museums Service 1988, p. 8, noting particularly two versions of Schalken’s Boy blowing on a Firebrand (‘The Boy blowing the Coal’) in English collections by the mid-eighteenth century: (
1
i
) recorded at Althorp, in 1746 (Kenneth Garlick, ‘A Catalogue of Pictures at Althorp’, Walpole Society 1974–1976, XLV, 1976, p. 76, cat. no. 585): now coll.
NGS
; (ii) in the collection of Henry Bell at King’s Lynn. Moore also notes (p. 26) three
small candlelights by Schalken in the collection of the dealer and collector Matthew
Boulter of Yarmouth by 1778. (Back to text.)
8. Wright 1995, p. 133, under no. 68. (Back to text.)
9. Nicolson 1968, p. 48. For his discussion of Frye as an influence on Wright, see pp. 42–4, 46, 48–9. (Back to text.)
10. See Michael Wynne, ‘Thomas Frye (1710–1762)’, Burlington Magazine, CXIV, 1972, pp. 79–84, figs. 13–31. (Back to text.)
11. See A Girl reading a Letter by Candlelight, with a Young Man peering over her Shoulder, c. 1760–2, coll. Col. R.S. Nelthorpe; Nicolson 1968, cat. no. 207, plate 45; Egerton 1990, cat. no. 14, repr. in colour. See also A Girl reading a Letter, with an Old Man reading over her Shoulder, ? exh. SA 1767 or 1768: Nicolson 1968, cat. no. 205, plate 77: Egerton 1990, cat. no. 15, repr. in colour. (Back to text.)
12. See Mary Bennett, ‘Boy with a Candle’, Burlington Magazine, CXIX, 1977, p. 857. Another picture by Romney of a boy (probably also his brother James) with a candle was formerly with Sidney Sabin. (Back to text.)
13. Exh. SA 1764 (73). Walpole’s catalogue annotation is quoted by Graves 1907, p. 175. There are many versions, including one in the Tate Gallery (N 05471), whose collection also includes A Lady’s Maid soaping Linen and A Laundry Maid Ironing. (Back to text.)
14. For Foldsone, see Waterhouse 1981, p. 128. (Back to text.)
15. Coll. National Trust (Upton House): exh. SA 1783 (203). See Laing 1995, p. 70, repr. p. 71 in colour. (Back to text.)
16. Ozias Humphry, MS ‘Particulars of the Life of Mr Stubbs’, coll. Liverpool City Libraries. (Back to text.)
17. Exh. SA 1765 (163). Private collection; Nicolson 1968, cat. no. 188, plate 52; Egerton 1990, cat. no. 22, repr. in colour. (Back to text.)
18. Nicolson 1968, p. 50. Private collection; Nicolson 1968, cat
,
.
no. 206, plate 76; Egerton 1990, cat. no. 16, repr. in colour. (Back to text.)
19. Coll. Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London; Nicolson 1968, cat. no. 212, plate 75; Egerton 1990, cat. no. 17, repr. in colour. This subject is derived from an engraving by Charles‐Nicolas Cochin of 1740. (Back to text.)
20. Coll. Derby Art Gallery; Nicolson 1968, cat. no. 190, plate 54, with details figs. 37–8; Egerton 1990, cat. no. 18, repr. in colour; and see David Fraser in Egerton 1990, pp. 16–17. (Back to text.)
21. Quoted by Francis Maddison, ‘An Eighteenth Century Orrery by Thomas Heath and some earlier orreries’, Connoisseur, CXLI, 1958, pp. 163–4. (Back to text.)
22. Published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Abridged, vol. II, 1672–83, London 1809, pp. 239–40. (Back to text.)
23. See Schupbach 1987, p. 341. (Back to text.)
24. Schupbach 1987, p. 341. (Back to text.)
25. See William Constable as Patron 1721–1791, exh. cat., Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston‐upon‐Hull 1970; both the air pump supplied by Cole and his receipt for William Constable’s payment were exhibited (cat. nos. 128–9). (Back to text.)
26. Among these, Schupbach 1987 lists John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744), Benjamin Worster ( fl. 1719–30), Benjamin Martin (1704/5–76) and Adam Walker (?1731–1821), as well as James Ferguson (1710–76). (Back to text.)
27. See E. Henderson, Life of James Ferguson, F.R.S., Edinburgh, London and Glasgow 1867, p. 133. See also John R. Millburn, Wheelwright of the Heavens: The Life and Work of James Ferguson, F.R.S., London 1988. (Back to text.)
28. Ferguson, Tracts and Tables, first published 1767, with lists of apparatus to be used in the lectures, in Henderson 1867, pp. 343–8. (Back to text.)
29. This is the syllabus as published in 1769; see Henderson 1867, p. 355. (Back to text.)
30. Henderson 1867, p. 268. Henderson records that in the Midlands Ferguson gave ‘his usual course of lectures on Astronomy, Mechanics, Hydraulcs. &c .’; but almost certainly it would have included the customary lecture on pneumatics (including the air pump). Ferguson repeated his course of lectures in Derby in 1771. (Back to text.)
31. For the Lunar Society, established in Birmingham around 1764–5, see Robert
F. Scholfield
E. Schofield
, The Lunar Society of Birmingham, Oxford 1963; a short account is given by Fraser (in Egerton 1990), p. 15. Its members were Midlands scientists, manufacturers, doctors, etc. Wright
was not himself a member of the Lunar Society; his closest contacts with that Society
were through his friend and near neighbour in Derby, John Whitehurst FRS (1713–88),
maker of clocks, barometers and other instruments, and Dr Erasmus Darwin, who moved
from Lichfield to Derby in 1783. For Wright’s portraits of Darwin and Whitehurst,
see Egerton 1990, cat. nos. 144–5, 147. (Back to text.)
32. Quoted by Schupbach 1987, pp. 342–3, from Martin 1755, vol. I, pp. 398–9. (Back to text.)
33. James Ferguson, Lectures on Select Subjects, London 1760, p. 200; quoted by Nicolson 1968, p. 114. (Back to text.)
34. For Richard Savage, see Richard Holmes, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage, London 1993, passim . The quotation is taken from ed. Clarence Tracy, The Poetical Works of Richard Savage, Cambridge 1962, p. 128. (Back to text.)
35. See ed. Tracy 1962, pp. 94–5. The Wanderer was begun in 1726–7. In December 1727 Savage was tried for murder, and condemned to death; he was pardoned in January 1728, and completed the greater part of The Wanderer later that year. (Back to text.)
36. For instance, Edwin, from Dr Beattie’s Minstrel (Nicolson 1968, cat. no. 235); The Dead Soldier (Nicolson 1968, cat. nos 238–40), taken from John Langhorne’s The Country Justice (and various scenes from Sterne). (Back to text.)
37. Private collection. Painted c. 1767 on the reverse of a Self Portrait, 62.2 × 76.2 cm, turned sideways. Nicolson 1968, cat. no. 193, plate 59. (Back to text.)
38. Schupbach 1987, p. 346. (Back to text.)
39. Schupbach 1987, p. 346. (Back to text.)
40. In correspondence with the compiler 1988–90, Schupbach observes that the skull is lacking part of the jaw. (Back to text.)
41. See Michael Wynne, ‘A Pastel by Thomas Frye’, British Museum Yearbook II: Collectors and Collections, London 1977, pp. 242–4, fig. 204; also repr. Egerton 1990, p. 61, fig. 10. The drawing appears to have belonged to the Tate family of Liverpool, perhaps to Thomas Moss Tate, Wright’s pupil; thus it was probably easily accessible to Wright. (Back to text.)
42. Kate Atkinson, ‘Author’s Picture Choice’, in NG News, June 1997 [pp. 1–2]. (Back to text.)
43. Schupbach 1987, p. 347. (Back to text.)
44. Private collection, New York; c. 1762–3, Egerton 1990, cat. no. 13, repr. in colour. (Back to text.)
45. Busch 1986, pp. 26–49. (Back to text.)
46. See Clayton 1990, p. 235. (Back to text.)
47. Repr. Diderot: Salons, ed. Jean Seznec, Oxford 1967, vol. IV, fig. 81, as ‘ancienne collection Youssoupoff’ (USSR). The compiler is indebted to her colleague Humphrey Wine for drawing this picture to her attention. (Back to text.)
48. Diderot: Salons, p. 175. (Back to text.)
49. The painting is reproduced here from a reproduction in Charles Oulmont, ‘Amédée van Loo’, Gazette des Beaux‐Arts, 1912, 2 parts, Pt ii, p. 149. (Back to text.)
50. Coll. Yale Center for British Art; exh. SA 1769 (197), Nicolson 1968, cat. no. 189, plate 60; Egerton 1990, cat. no. 23, repr. in colour. (Back to text.)
51. Exh. SA 1773 (370). Walpole thought the figure ‘bad and inexpressive’, and noted that he had ‘a lanthorn hanging over him’. Nicolson 1968 (cat. no. 214, as untraced) thinks this captive was probably the crusader Guy de Luignan. (Back to text.)
52. The Captive, 1774, is coll. Vancouver Art Gallery; Egerton 1990, cat. no. 53, repr. in colour. The Captive, exh. RA 1778 (360), is coll. Derby Art Gallery (Nicolson 1968, cat. no. 217, plate 162). (Back to text.)
Abbreviations
- ARA
- Associate [member] of the Royal Academy
- bt
- bought (usually in the saleroom)
- NG
- National Gallery, London
- NGA
- Washington National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
- NGS
- National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
- RA
- Royal Academy of Arts, London; Royal Academician
- SA
- Society of Artists, London
List of archive references cited
- Liverpool, Liverpool City Libraries, Picton Collection: Ozias Humphry, Particulars of the Life of Mr Stubbs… given to the author … by himself and committed from his own relation, MS, c.1790–7
List of references cited
- Atkinson 1997
- Atkinson, Kate, ‘Author’s Picture Choice’, National Gallery, London News, June 1997, [1–2]
- Bennett 1977
- Bennett, Mary, ‘Boy with a Candle’, Burlington Magazine, 1977, CXIX, 857
- Busch 1986
- Busch, Werner, Joseph Wright of Derby. Das Experiment mit der Luftpumpe. Eine Heilige Allianz zwischen Wissenschaft und Religion, Frankfurt am Main 1986
- Clayton 1990
- Clayton, Tim, ‘A Catalogue of the Engraved Works of Wright of Derby’, in Wright of Derby, Judy Egerton (exh. cat. Tate Gallery, London, Grand Palais, Paris and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), London 1990
- Davies 1946a
- Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The British School, London 1946 (revised edn, London 1959)
- Davies 1959
- Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The British School, revised edn, London 1959
- Diderot 1967
- Diderot, Denis, Salons, eds Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar, Oxford 1967, vol. IV
- Egerton 1990
- Egerton, Judy, Wright of Derby (exh. cat. (including a catalogue of prints after Wright by Tim Clayton and essays by David Fraser, Rica Jones and Paul Mitchell), Tate Gallery, London, Grand Palais, Paris and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), London 1990
- Ferens 1970
- William Constable as Patron 1721–1791 (exh. cat.), Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston‐upon‐Hull 1970
- Ferguson 1760
- Ferguson, James, Lectures on Select Subjects, London 1760
- Ferguson 1767
- Ferguson, Tracts and Tables, 1767
- Flaubert 1988
- de Biasi, Pierre‐Marc, ed., Gustave Flaubert: Carnets du Travail, Paris 1988
- Fraser 1990
- Fraser, David, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby and the Lunar Society’, in Wright of Derby, Judy Egerton (exh. cat. Tate Gallery, London, Grand Palais, Paris and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), London 1990
- Garlick 1976
- Garlick, Kenneth, ‘A Catalogue of Pictures at Althorp’, The Walpole Society, 1974–1976, XLV
- Graves 1907
- Graves, Algernon, ed., The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760–1791; The Free Society of Artists 1761–1783. A Complete Dictionary of Contributors, London 1907 (facsimile reprint, Bath 1969)
- Henderson 1867
- Henderson, E., Life of James Ferguson, F.R.S., Edinburgh, London and Glasgow 1867
- Holmes 1993
- Holmes, Richard, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage, London 1993
- Laing 1995
- Laing, Alastair, In Trust for the Nation: Paintings from National Trust Houses (exh. cat. National Gallery, London), London 1995
- Maddison 1958
- Maddison, Francis, ‘An Eighteenth Century Orrery by Thomas Heath and some earlier orreries’, Connoisseur, 1958, CXLI, 163–4
- Martin 1755
- Martin, Benjamin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, 1755
- Millburn 1988
- Millburn, John R., Wheelwright of the Heavens: The Life and Work of James Ferguson, F.R.S., London 1988
- Moore 1988
- Moore, Andrew W., Dutch and Flemish Painting in Norfolk (exh. cat. Norfolk Museums Service), 1988
- Nicolson 1968
- Nicolson, Benedict, Joseph Wright of Derby, Painter of Light (I: Text and Catalogue; II: Plates), 2 vols, London 1968
- Nicolson 1979
- Nicolson, Benedict, ‘Artificial Light in Painting in the 17th Century’, in Caravaggism in Europe, ed. L. Vertova (text of a lecture given in the 1970s), Turin 1979
- Oppé 1951
- Oppé, A.P., ed., ‘Memoirs of Thomas Jones’, The Walpole Society, 1946–1948 (1951), XXXII
- Oulmont 1912
- Oulmont, Charles, ‘Amédée van Loo’, Gazette des Beaux‐Arts, 1912
- Papin 1809
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Abridged, London 1809, II (1672–83), 239–40
- Redgrave 1947
- Redgrave, Richard and Samuel Redgrave, A Century of British Painters, London 1947 (first edn, 1866)
- Robinson 1958
- Robinson, Eric, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby: the Philosopher’s Painter’, Burlington Magazine, c. 1958, 214
- Schofield 1963
- Schofield, Robert E., The Lunar Society of Birmingham, Oxford 1963
- Schupbach 1987
- Schupbach, William, ‘A Select Iconography of Animal Experiment’, in Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicholas A. Rupke, London 1987, 340–7
- Shurlock 1923
- Shurlock, F.W., ‘The Scientific Pictures of Joseph Wright’, Science Progress, 1923, 432–8
- Solkin 1993
- Solkin, David H., Painting for Money, New Haven and London 1993
- Stafford 1994
- Stafford, Barbara Maria, Artful Science, Cambridge, Mass. 1994
- Sunderland 1986
- Sunderland, John, ‘John Hamilton Mortimer: His Life and Works’, The Walpole Society, 1986 (1988), LII
- Tracy 1962
- Tracy, Clarence, ed., The Poetical Works of Richard Savage, Cambridge 1962
- Waterhouse 1953
- Waterhouse, Ellis, Painting in Britain 1530–1790, London 1953 (2nd edn, 1962)
- Wright 1995
- Wright, Christopher, Masters of Candlelight, Landshut 1995
- Wynne 1972
- Wynne, Michael, ‘Thomas Frye (1710–1762)’, Burlington Magazine, 1972, CXIV, 79–84
- Wynne 1977
- Wynne, Michael, ‘Pastel by Thomas Frye’, in British Museum Yearbook II: Collectors and Collections, London 1977, 242–4
List of exhibitions cited
- Derby 1912–47
- Derby, Derby Art Gallery, long–term loan, 1912–47
- Derby 1934
- Derby, Corporation Art Gallery, Wright of Derby Bicentenary Exhibition, 1934
- Derby and Leicester 1947
- Derby, Derby Art Gallery; Leicester, Leicester Art Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Joseph Wright ARA, 1947
- London 1767
- London, Society of Artists, 1767
- London 1768a
- London, Society of Artists, 1768
- London 1768b
- London, Society of Artists, [special exhibition in honour of the King of Denmark], September 1768
- London 1947–71
- London, Tate Gallery, on display, 1947–71
- London 1972–86
- London, Tate Gallery, on display, 1972–86
- London 1982–1983
- London, National Gallery, on loan, November 1982–January 1983
- London and Cardiff 1982-3
- London, Tate Gallery; Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, Richard Wilson, 1982–3
- London, Paris and New York 1990
- London, Tate Gallery; Paris, Grand Palais; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wright of Derby, 1990
- Stockholm 1979–80
- Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, 1700‐tal: Tanke och form i rokokon, 1979–80
- Washington 1976
- Washington, National Gallery of Art, The Eye of Thomas Jefferson, 1976
Arrangement of the Catalogue
This is a catalogue of the 61 works which represent the British School in the National
Gallery now, at the beginning of 1998. The first Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, with Critical Remarks
on their Merits, by W. Young Ottley, was published in 1832 (earlier catalogues were hardly more than hand‐lists). The first scholarly catalogue
devoted to the Gallery’s British pictures – National Gallery Catalogues: The British School – was compiled by Martin Davies (Director 1968–73). Its first edition in 1946 included 333 pictures. By 1959, when Davies published a revised edition (following large transfers of pictures upon
the Tate’s separation
in 1954
from the National Gallery in 1954), the number of British pictures in the National
Gallery had been reduced to 99.
Martin Davies’s British School catalogue still stands as a model of concise record and meticulous (sometimes astringent) footnotes. This catalogue is chattier. I have tried to combine accurate information about the making and subsequent history of the pictures with more concern for their subject matter than Martin Davies allowed himself. Here I share to the full Neil MacGregor’s conviction that the public should have as much information as possible about their pictures. In a collection still dominated by portraits, much information about sitters (men, women and, in the largest portrait of all, a horse) is available; some of it may help to assess how far a portraitist has succeeded in reflecting [page 17]individual character. The background information offered here can, of course, be skipped, leaving the illustrations – or better still, the actual works – to speak for themselves.
All the works have been examined in the company of Martin Wyld, the Gallery’s Chief Restorer. He has compiled all the Technical Notes except for those on Hogarth’s Marriage A‐la‐Mode, which have been contributed by David Bomford. Many of these Technical Notes incorporate the results of detailed examination by Ashok Roy, Head of the Scientific Department, and by his colleagues Raymond White and Jennie Pilc. The bibliography of published work on the techniques and pigments used by artists during the period covered by this catalogue (pp. 432–5) has been compiled by Jo Kirby of the Gallery’s Scientific Department.
The catalogue is arranged in the two parts into which it fairly naturally falls. Part I catalogues the well‐known and deservedly popular works which are nearly always on view (except when lent to outside exhibitions). The artists represented in it are Constable, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Thomas Jones, Lawrence, Reynolds, Sargent, Stubbs, Turner, Wilson, Wright of Derby and Zoffany, arranged in alphabetical order, with their works (when more than one) in their known (or likely) chronological sequence. The time‐span of works by this small group of twelve artists is hardly more than 150 years, from Hogarth’s six paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode, of about 1742, to Sargent’s Lord Ribblesdale, dated 1902. In this part of the catalogue, movements of pictures to and from the Tate are briefly noted (below the heading Exhibited), such information being offered to reassure those who remember seeing, say, Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump in the Tate rather than in the National Gallery (or recalling locations given in past literature) that their recollection was not at fault. Under this heading, movements for short periods usually indicate loans supplied by the Tate to fill gaps on the National Gallery walls when it lent pictures for exhibition elsewhere. ‘Tate 1960–1’, frequently noted, indicates the period of the Gallery’s winter exhibition National Gallery Acquisitions 1953–62 ; to make room for this exhibition, most of its British School pictures were accommodated and displayed in the Tate Gallery.
Part II catalogues the Gallery’s collection of portraits (including four marble busts) of those who played significant parts in the history of the National Gallery itself. Since it is in a sense a narrative (though an incomplete one) of the Gallery’s history, Part II is presented chronologically, according to the various sitters’ relationships to the National Gallery. Lawrence is the only artist to appear in both parts of this catalogue (his portrait of *Queen Charlotte appears in Part I, his two portraits of *John Julius Angerstein in Part II). In this group, Sir George Beaumont (grudgingly sitting to Hoppner, an artist he habitually denigrated) will be a familiar figure in the history of British art. Other Trustees and benefactors – preeminently, perhaps, Layard of Nineveh – will be better known outside the perspectives of the National Gallery, while two of its minor heroes – William Seguier, the Gallery’s first Keeper, and William Boxall RA , its second Director – may hardly be known at all.
Few portraits of National Gallery benefactors were ever transferred to the Tate; the only exceptions appear to be the transfer of the first version of Linnell’s portrait of Samuel Rogers (the National Gallery retaining a second version) and the transfer in 1949 of Hoppner’s portrait of Charles Long, Lord Farnborough, accepted by the National Gallery as a gift in 1934, but hung for a few months only, before being pronounced by Sir Kenneth Clark (Director, 1933–45) ‘not worth a place’. The National Gallery retains a finer image of Long in the form of Chantrey’s marble bust. Most of the works in Part II are hung in the Reception Area or the Reserve Collection.
All but one of the benefactors who figure in Part II have one thing in common: they bought pictures, but begat no heirs, and therefore chose to give or bequeath paintings to the National Gallery. The exception is the actor‐manager Thomas Denison Lewis, who in 1849 bequeathed not only *Mr Lewis as The Marquis in the Midnight Hour (Shee’s portrait of his famous actor‐father), but also £10,000 for future Gallery purchases. Prudently invested, the Lewis Fund enabled the purchase of many National Gallery pictures of all schools, including two much‐loved British pictures: the Heads of Six of Hogarth’s Servants and Gainsborough’s *Cornard Wood. The Hogarth was transferred to the Tate in 1960: thus, unknowingly, Lewis became a benefactor to both institutions.
Ann
An
Appendix includes provisional catalogue entries for *Portrait of a Lady, painted by Cornelius Johnson (or Jonson van Ceulen) after his return to Holland,
and *On the Delaware, by the wholly American painter George Inness. Both were included in Martin Davies’s
British School catalogue, but since they do not properly belong to the British School, they will
eventually be included in more appropriate Schools catalogues.
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- https://data.ng.ac.uk/086R-000B-0000-0000
- Chicago style
- Egerton, Judy. "NG 725, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump". 2000, online version 1, October 17, 2024. https://data.ng.ac.uk/0872-000B-0000-0000.
- Harvard style
- Egerton, Judy (2000) NG 725, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. Online version 1, London: National Gallery, 2024. Available at: https://data.ng.ac.uk/0872-000B-0000-0000 (Accessed: 11 November 2024).
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