JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY (1734-97)

He catches something, perhaps,
In Darwin’s grandfather and Arkwright:

If not enlightenment,
Then something out of the ordinary
Of his other, blander portraits.
Meanwhile, as the old light of the world dims.
His destiny shapes in the twilight, waiting to show.
Shadow and light, light and shadow,
Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 By candles and lamps,
Children’s faces are lit
In pleasure and wonder
Above an orrery of moons and planets,
Or as a letter is read,
Or girls dress a kitten,
Or a boy blows up a bladder
And an alchemist boils urine
In the ball of a flaring flask
Inside what may be a church,
Whilst what might be a sun
Rising or setting, frames an Indian widow
Lamenting her husband

And perhaps a whole way of life.
Chanting long and low;
Light and shadow, light and shadow,

Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 Not much interested in sunlight,
It was fire that fascinated Wright:
Candles and lanterns in the night;
Forges and fireworks;
Flames and phosphorous;
Vulcan’s white-hot spear,
Tossed out of Vesuvius
Into cavernous clouds of smoke
And the blacksmith’s crowded shop
Where a white-hot iron bar
Is hammered in the sparkle and glow;
Shadow and light, light and shadow,
Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 But moonlight is never far away:
If the sun was God for Turner,
Then the moon was Wright’s goddess.
See it there in the room where the scientist
With his air-pump suffocates the bird under glass
To the horror of the children,
But note the boy in the corner at a curtain,
Revealing the moon through the window.
In the sea caves of the painter’s brain,
He gazes out - like that same scientist -
At moons over dark sails and lighthouses
And above a bridge and a volcano.
Shadow and light, light and shadow,
Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 (2015)

 

The painting is An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump and can be seen - along with several of the other pictures referred to here - in the excellent Derby Museum & Art Gallery.