In Tate Britain
Prints and Drawings Rooms
View by AppointmentBiography
Joseph Wright (3 September 1734 – 29 August 1797), styled Joseph Wright of Derby, was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution".
Wright is notable for his use of chiaroscuro effect, which emphasises the contrast of light and dark, and, for his paintings of candle-lit subjects. His paintings of the birth of science out of alchemy, often based on the meetings of the Lunar Society, a group of scientists and industrialists living in the English Midlands, are a significant record of the struggle of science against religious values in the period known as the Age of Enlightenment.
Many of Wright's paintings and drawings are owned by Derby City Council, and are on display at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery.
This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License. Spotted a problem? Let us know.
Read full Wikipedia entryArtworks
Attributed to Joseph Wright of Derby Study of an Unknown Man
c.1751–7
Film and audio
>
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
Alice Insley – Painter and Place: Joseph Wright of Derby in the 19th century
Alice Insley gives an account of the early years of Derby Free Library and Museum and discusses how the museum ...
Features
Art Term
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro is an Italian term which translates as light-dark, and refers to the balance and pattern of light and shade ...
Read
The Craze for Pastel: Essay
Ruth Kenny's essay on The Craze for Pastel in conjunction with a 2014 BP Spotlight display at Tate Britain ...
Tate Etc
The lowly weed has its day: Private view
The celebrated nature writer takes a personal tour of those lesser known pictorial heroes that feature in many works within ...
Tate Etc
The deliberate accident in art: Blots
Ever since Leonardo da Vinci urged artists to search for inspiration in the dirt on walls or the streaked patterns ...
Tate Etc
The emblem of earthly vanities: Shadows
In folk tales, Gothic novels and film noir, shadows are premonitions, harbingers of threat and death. Western painting and its ...
Tate Etc
MicroTate 8
Francis Wells on Luke Fildes’s The Doctor 1891, Alexa de Ferranti on William Hogarth’s The Painter and his Pug 1745 ...
Tate Papers
Gothic Romance and the Quixotic Hero:A Pageant for Henry Fuseli in 1783
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was one of the most inventive artists of his age, exploring the strange and fantastic in ...
You might like
Philip James De Loutherbourg
1740–1812
Francis Towne
1739–1816
Henry Fuseli
1741–1825
John Inigo Richards
1731–1810
Joseph Farington
1747–1821
Richard Wilson
1713–1782
Nicholas Thomas Dall
active 1748–1776
Jacob More
c.1740–1793
George Stubbs
1724–1806
Thomas Gainsborough
1727–1788
William Marlow
1740–1813
Thomas Jones
1742–1803
John Hamilton Mortimer
1740–1779
George Romney
1734–1802
John Downman
1750–1824