Joseph Wright of Derby

A revelatory study of one of the 18th century’s greatest artists, which places him in relation to the darker side of the English Enlightenment

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797), though conventionally known as a ‘painter of light’, returned repeatedly to nocturnal images. His essential preoccupations were dark and melancholy, with an enduring concern for death, ruin, old age, loss of innocence, isolation, and tragedy.

In this long-awaited book, Matthew Craske adopts a fresh approach to Wright. He takes seriously contemporary reports of Wright's melancholia and nervous disposition and goes on to question accepted understandings of the artist. Long seen as a quintessentially modern and progressive figure—one of the artistic icons of the English Enlightenment—Craske overturns this traditional view. He demonstrates to what extent Wright, rather than being a spokesman for scientific progress, was actually a melancholic and sceptical outsider, increasingly retreating into a solitary, rural world of philosophical and poetic reflection, with an artistic vision that was correspondingly dark and meditative.

Craske offers a succession of new and powerful interpretations of the artist’s paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces. In doing so, he recovers Wright’s deep engagement with the landscape, with the pleasures and sufferings of solitude, and with the themes of time, history, and mortality.

In this book, Joseph Wright of Derby emerges not only as one of Britain’s most ambitious and innovative artists, but also as one of its most profound.

Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.