RCEWA – an Academy by Lamplight by Joseph Wright of Derby

RCEWA – An Academy by Lamplight by Joseph Wright of Derby Statement of the Expert Adviser to the Secretary of State that the painting meets Waverley criterion two. Further Information The ‘Note of Case History’ is available on the Arts Council Website: www.artscouncil.org.uk/reviewing-committee-case-hearings EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1. Brief Description of item(s) Joseph Wright of Derby (Derby, 1734-1797) An Academy by Lamplight, 1769 Oil on canvas, 127 x 101.6 cm The painting is in very good condition. 2. Context Provenance: Probably Sir Francis Crossley, 1st Bt of Halifax (1817–1872), Belle Vue, Halifax, West Yorkshire; probably by inheritance to his widow Martha Eliza Crossley (c. 1821–1891), who, following her husband’s death, moved the contents of Belle Vue to Somerleyton Hall, Lowestoft, Suffolk; by descent to her son, Sir Savile Crossley, 2nd Bt and 1st Lord Somerleyton (1857–1935), at Somerleyton Hall; thence by direct descent. Exhibitions: London, Society of Artists, 1769, no. 197; Munich, The Residenz, Europaisches Rokoko: Kunst und Kultur des 18 Jahrhunderts, 15 June – 15 September 1958, no. 119; London, Sotheby’s, Childhood. A Loan Exhibition of Works of Art, 2–27 January 1988, no. 92; Nottingham University and Iveagh Bequest Kenwood, The Artist’s Model in British Art from Lely to Etty, 1991; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, In the Public Eye: Treasures from the East of England, 1999, no. 111; Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, Light! – The Industrial Age: 1750–1900 Art and Science, Technology and Society, 20 October 2000 – 11 February 2001, no. 6; Pittsberg, Carnegie Museum of Art, Light! – The Industrial Age: 1750–1900 Art and Science, Technology and Society, 7 April – 29 July 2001, no. 6; Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool, 17 November 2007 – 24 February 2008, no. 31. Selected Literature: Anon., Inventory of the Contents of Somerleyton Hall, 1939, p. 19 (as hanging in the Dining Room); B. Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby, exh. cat., Arts Council, London 1958, p. 13; V.H. Rinn, Europaisches Rokoko: Kunst und Kultur des 18 Jahrhunderts, exh. cat., Munich 1958, no. 119, p. 109; J. Egerton, Wright of Derby, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London 1990, p. 64; Anon., In the Public Eye: Treasures from the East of England, exh. cat., Cambridge 1999, checklist 111; A. Blühm and L. Lippincott, Light! The Industrial Age 1750–1900. Art & Science, Technology & Society, exh. cat., London, Pittsburgh and Amsterdam 2000, pp. 70 and 244, reproduced in colour p. 70; E. Barker and A. Kidson et al., Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool, exh. cat., New Haven and London 2007, no. 31, p. 159, reproduced in colour p. 160 and on the front jacket (detail); M. Postle, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby. Liverpool and New Haven’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. CL, April 2008, pp. 277-78, reproduced in colour fig. 90; S. Leach, ‘‘The little foibles of children’. An Academy by lamplight (1769) by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797)’, The British Art Journal, vol. XVII, no. 3, Spring 2017, pp. 40-43. 3. Waverley Criteria This painting meets Waverley criterion 2 owing to its outstanding aesthetic importance as the first version of one of Joseph Wright of Derby’s earliest and most ambitious candlelit subject paintings. DETAILED CASE 1. Detailed description of item(s) if more than in Executive Summary, and any comments. Emerging from a mysterious, dark space, a group of six young draughtsmen intently study an antique marble statue. Their features and those of the statue are picked up by a single feeble light source, a hanging oil lamp almost impossible to discern behind a draped red curtain. The soft, warm light flickers across the figures, picking out, against the deep black background: loosely tied collars and cuffs; ribboned buckles and loose stockings; bent elbows and knees; hand gripping chalk holders and half-finished drawings; concentrated expressions and adoring eyes. The six young men, the youngest perhaps six and the oldest about eighteen, offer various responses to the statue: three adolescents are shown diligently focused on their black and white chalk drawings on blue paper; of the two oldest men, one gazes amorously at the statue, enraptured, without even attempting to sketch it, while the second authoritatively rests an arm on the plinth, holding a portfolio of drawings in the other and gazes thoughtfully in the opposite direction; while the youngest, probably too juvenile for such serious study gazes out at the viewer. The warm glow of the lamp illuminates the statue, known as the Borghese Nymph with a Shell (now at the Louvre), almost transforming the cold stone into flesh, imbuing it with a soft sensuousness, reinforcing the adoring awe of the young men sketching from the Antique. This is as much a picture about artistic awakening as it is about nascent sexuality. Unlike Joseph Wright of Derby’s busier second version of the composition, held at the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, which sets the scene in a more complex vaulted architectural setting, in this earlier version Wright structures his composition entirely through the group of young men, anchored around the sensuous nymph at the centre, focusing our gaze on her and her exposed breast catching the light. Just like for the group of young men, she is set up to become the subject of the viewer’s adoration. The subject inscribes itself in a tradition of representations of academies depicting artists learning from life and the antique, which surfaced along with the formation of academies throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. However, unlike the usually more formal depictions of the subject, this work can be seen as an idyll, an informal scene in which unsupervised burgeoning artists pursue their studies without formal instruction. It was no coincidence that Wright chose to exhibit this subject at the 1769 exhibition of the Society of Artists of Great Britain. Wright was at the centre of a crisis that shook the British art world in the 1760s, and resulted in the fracturing of the established Society of Artists of Great Britain and the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768, under the presidency of Joshua Reynolds. Wright’s decision, as one of the few leading artists who continued to champion the Society of Artists, to exhibit his Academy by Lamplight in 1769, the year that the newly established Royal Academy held its first public exhibition must have been deliberate: the egalitarian approach to artistic tuition depicted through these six young men, which David Solkin referred to as ‘a self-regulating community of equals’ was one championed by the Society of Artists, but was in stinging contradiction to the new authoritarian and hierarchical structure that Reynolds had only just established at the Royal Academy under the illiberal patronage of King George III.1 As such, whilst being a work of great beauty, Wright’s An Academy by Lamplight also bears witness to an important moment in the political development of British art. 2. Detailed explanation of the outstanding significance of the item(s). This large canvas is one of Joseph Wright of Derby’s most ambitious and elegant early paintings. Born in Derby in 1734, Wright undertook his artistic education in London, but apart from a few years spent in Italy in the 1770s, spent most of his life working in the Midlands. A member of enlightened circles, he was a highly intellectual and singular artist and one of the most important, and most distinctive British painters of the eighteenth century. The most notable characteristic of Wright’s work is his use of dramatic chiaroscuro effects – a boldness which nowhere is more evident than in the candlelit scenes he produced early in his career – which earned him the nickname of the ‘Painter of Light’. Wright was part of the Lunar Society, which included philosophers, scientists and artists among them Josiah Wedgwood, Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Banks. Together they challenged accepted beliefs and pushed the boundaries of scientific and intellectual exploration. In his early candlelit scenes such as An Academy by Lamplight, Wright celebrated a new appetite for learning and captured the spirit of enlightened enquiry of his age perhaps more than any other contemporary painter. Wright’s early pictures fitted in none of the accepted categories of British art in the mid-eighteenth century: as Judy Egerton has remarked, they were too serious to be seen as conversation pieces, but too modern to be history paintings.2 Wright was probably influenced by seeing the chiaroscuro work of Godfried Schalcken (1643-1706) who had spent some time working in England, and whose works in a European tradition of candlelit scenes were popular with English collectors, as well as by the mezzotints of Thomas Frye (1710-1762). However, Wright moved beyond the trivial fantasy of their works, adapting the beauty of chiaroscuro effects to serious contemporary subjects. During the 1760s, Wright painted a series of candlelit pictures of increasing complexity and ambition, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby) in 1766, An 1 David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England, New Haven and London 1992, p. 244. 2Judy Egerton, National Gallery Catalogues: The British School, London 1998, p. 334. Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (The National Gallery, London) in 1768, culminating in An Academy by Lamplight in 1769, the subject of this statement and the last candlelit picture he painted. In these works, Wright deployed chiaroscuro to dramatic effect in a way that was new to British art. His gravely beautiful Academy by Lamplight can be seen as his most refined chiaroscuro work, the culmination of his attempt to bring the use of the chiaroscuro to serious scenes to suggest the studious excitement that is found in the acquisition of knowledge.

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