“A painting so great, and so strange”

Laura Cummings’s review of the Derby Museum in England for the Guardian is the sort of review that makes me want to look up plane and train schedules:

There is a painting so great, and so strange, in the city of Derby as to be worth the visit to the gallery alone. It shows a group of spectators gathered in deep darkness round a clockwork model of the solar system. Their faces are illuminated only by an invisible source: the hidden lamp that stands in for the sun. . . .

Joseph Wright’s A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery (1766) has pride of place in Derby Museum and Art Gallery, as it should. During his life and long after his death, Wright (1734-97) was chiefly known for two things: having his name infrangibly bound to the Midlands town of his birth, and being Britain’s best painter of candlelight. . . .

Today’s museum feels uniquely intimate. Here is [Richard] Arkwright, and then a painting of his cotton mill, where the 12-hour shifts ran right through the night; and then a clock designed by John Whitehurst to record the running time of machines alongside standard time, on two dials; and then Wright’s portrait of Whitehurst.

Here too is the 120,000-year-old hippo found in a Derby suburb; the Roman dice discovered beneath the ring road; the pigeon King of Rome, which broke all speed records racing 1,001 miles back home from Italy in 1913. And all of this appears alongside French revolutionary shoes, Cycladic figures, samurai armour, Egyptian mummies and dinosaurs that children can touch.

All this place needs, as the gallery prepares to show 400 of Wright’s lithe and animate drawings in 2024, alongside his painted masterpieces, is a massive dose of money (come on, plutocrats) to lift its premises and presentation up to the standards of its Enlightenment stars. Then Derby Museum and Art Gallery can be what it ought to be, a miniature rival to the British Museum, without all the stealing.

New Faces at the Museum of Fine Arts

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts recently acquired this portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, one of my favorite British artists of the late eighteenth century.

On 15 Apr 1776, Wright wrote to a relative, “I am now painting a half length of D.r Wilson & his adopted Daughter Miss Macauley.” He described undertaking the job as “for reputation only” as he tried to build up a clientele in Bath.

The Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson was a distinguished London minister. He was also the main patron of historian Catharine Macaulay, who in 1763 began publishing her major work, eventually titled The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line.

Macaulay gave birth to a daughter in 1765. The next year, her obstetrician husband died. She continued to write, becoming more open about her radical politics both in pamphlets and in her history as the events she recounted approached the present day.

In 1772 the Rev. Dr. Wilson’s wife died. After that, he spent most of this time in Bath, inviting Mrs. Macaulay and her daughter to join him. In 1775 the childless widower adopted eleven-year-old Catherine Sophia Macaulay as his heir. He also granted her mother the lease of the Bath house and promised her an annuity.

The dealer of this painting, Lowell Libson and Jenny Yarker Ltd., points out that Wright showed Catherine Sophia and her adopted father reading her mother’s history, so Catharine Macaulay appears in the painting symbolically. Likewise, when Robert Edge Pine painted Macaulay the previous year, he depicted her with five volumes and a letter inscribed, “Revd. Dr: Thos Wilson Citizen of London and Rector of Wallbrook.”

The dealer also notes how Wright portrayed Catherine Sophia and Wilson as sharp contrasts: youth versus age, feminine versus masculine, pastels versus red, black, and white. Yet they are brought together in a discussion of her mother’s work.

The Wilson household was an intellectual center at Bath, and Wright hoped the minister would recommend him for more commissions. But jobs didn’t come in fast enough, and the painter returned to his home territory of Derby in 1777.

The year after that, a rift opened between the Rev. Dr. Wilson and Mrs. Macaulay.

TOMORROW: Celebrating a celebrity author.

The Beard of John Stavely

Beards were not fashionable in the British Empire during the eighteenth century.

This fact is sometimes regretted by reenactors who don’t want to shave their modern beards, but the artistic record is clear.

That doesn’t mean there were no bearded men in Revolutionary America. Rather, they were few, and people saw them as unusual. The Boston shoemaker William Scott grew a long beard for religious reasons, and it scared children on the street.

Another man of the period noted for his full beard was John Stavely. We know him as a model for the painter Joseph Wright of Derby. And we know his name only by the inscription on the back of a Wright drawing now in the collection of the Morgan Library:

Portrait of
John Stavely
who came from Hert-
fordshire with Mr. French
& sat to Mr. Wright in the character of the old man & his ass in the
Sentimental Journey

We can spot the same bearded face in other Wright paintings and drawings, such as his two versions of The Captive and various studies as the man aged.

The Sotheby’s site says:

Wright’s practise of employing old men as models in the 1760s and early ’70s is well documented and the artist’s account book, now preserved in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery in London, includes the details and addresses of several local Derbyshire characters that sat for him on a regular basis. . . . Perhaps his favourite model, however, was a character known as Old John Staveley…

Stavely’s most famous role for Wright was as the scientist in The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers. Wright finished this painting in 1771, then went back over it in 1795.

Unfortunately, we don’t appear to have any account of what John Stavely’s family and neighbors thought of his beard. We know only that when Joseph Wright of Derby wanted to paint bearded men, he had a limited pool to choose from.