Joseph Wright of Derby - His art and his market

London’s National Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition dedicated to the candlelit and nocturnal paintings of Joseph Wright, called Wright of Derby (Wright of Derby: From the Shadows, until 10 May 2026). Surprisingly, considering the artist’s most famous painting – An experiment on a bird in the air pump (1768) – is in the museum’s permanent collection, the National Gallery has never before staged an exhibition dedicated to Wright’s work.

Joseph Wright hailed from Derby near the peak district, but he received his earliest training in London under the portraitist Thomas Hudson, who also trained the future Royal Academy President Sir Joshua Reynolds. After his apprenticeship and a period spent as a successful portraitist in Derby and Liverpool, where he became known for his dignified and inventive portraits of the upper middle and merchant classes, Wright spent nearly a year and a half touring around Italy between his arrival in February 1774 and his departure in June 1775. There, he was immersed in the drama and tenebrism of the Italian Baroque, a genre that continued to exert a profound influence on his style and compositions.

Much of the prior scholarship on Wright has focused on his role as a chronicler of the British Industrial Revolution, painting mills and factories, and counting among his most important patrons the inventor Sir Richard Arkwright and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood. In this exhibition, however, the focus is on the visual, exploring how Wright’s use of artificial lighting and nocturnal settings allows him to dial up the drama and intensity of his scenes. The tenebrism in his work comes directly from his engagement with the work of Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti, both in England and in Italy, paintings featuring large-scale figures arranged close to the picture plane and lit by an often-obscured single light source. Although Caravaggio himself was considered somewhat ‘vulgar’ among 18th Century British collectors, with his violent subjects, brawls, and religious fervour, Wright made tenebrism palatable – even desirable – by associating it with something that was fashionable: the Sublime, in Romantic painting and poetry.

From a commercial perspective, it should come as no surprise that four of the top ten prices fetched at auction for works by Wright were achieved by candlelight or nocturnal paintings, whether interior scenes or moonlit landscapes. The artist’s auction record was set in 2017 for An Academy by Lamplight, which fetched £7.3 million including premium in 2017, and in all probability the only reason there are not more nocturnal scenes in the top 10 is their scarcity. Wright was also a master of combining and contrasting two sources of nocturnal lighting – for instance, the warm glow of a manmade fire with the cool illumination of the moon – which we also see in the work of Continental contemporaries such as Vernet, Fabris and Lacroix.

Wright of Derby is also enjoying an overdue revision of scholarship. Although Benedict Nicolson’s 1968 catalogue raisonné is a useful tool for scholars and dealers, a number of new pictures have emerged since its publication – now nearly 60 years ago – and Martin Postle is currently completing a revised and updated catalogue of the artist’s work, due for publication in the near future. In 2020, Matthew Craske published Joseph Wright: Painter of Darkness, which explored the more melancholy and solitary aspects of Wright’s character, as expressed in his paintings.