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Wright of Derby: From the Shadows — The National Gallery Illuminates the Soul of the Enlightenment
- James Wentworth
- Oct 29
- 3 min read
Published on 29 October2025
This November, London’s National Gallery will open one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the season: Wright of Derby: From the Shadows (7 November 2025 – 10 May 2026). Dedicated entirely to Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797), the exhibition marks the first comprehensive exploration of his celebrated candlelight paintings — works that bridge the rational precision of the Enlightenment with the emotional intensity that would later define Romanticism. Organised in partnership with Derby Museums, the exhibition brings together over twenty paintings, drawings, prints and scientific instruments, tracing Wright’s fascination with the interplay between light, knowledge and faith. Among the highlights are An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768, National Gallery) and A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery, in Which a Lamp is Put in Place of the Sun (1766, Derby Museums) — masterpieces that return to London in a rare reunion with Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765, private collection) and An Academy by Lamplight (1769, Yale Center for British Art), which has not been seen in the United Kingdom for more than a decade.
Wright’s paintings shimmer with an otherworldly glow. At their centre, a single flame — the scientific lamp or the humble candle — becomes a metaphor for knowledge itself: fragile, flickering, yet capable of illuminating entire worlds. In these nocturnal scenes, the drama of observation replaces divine revelation; discovery becomes the new ritual. The viewer is drawn not merely to witness but to contemplate the very act of looking, as if caught between faith and reason. This duality lies at the heart of Wright’s genius. While often celebrated as “the painter of the Enlightenment”, his work also reveals a profound awareness of its limits. His chiaroscuro is not only technical but philosophical — light as truth, shadow as doubt. Each canvas becomes a moral theatre where science, mortality and wonder coexist. In The Air Pump, life and death hang in equilibrium; in The Orrery, the cosmos turns mechanically while human curiosity burns like the lamp that replaces the sun.
What distinguishes Wright from his contemporaries is his ability to turn scientific inquiry into emotional revelation. His experiments in light were not cold demonstrations of reason but meditations on the fragility of existence. In this sense, Wright anticipated the sensibilities of later artists such as Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, who would also use light and atmosphere to explore the boundaries of the human spirit. His nocturnes — saturated with ambiguity and awe — laid the foundations for the Romantic imagination. As one of the exhibition’s curators notes, “Wright transformed candlelight into a theatre of knowledge and emotion, bridging Enlightenment reason with the sublime visions of Romanticism.” It is precisely this tension between intellect and feeling that gives his art its enduring power.
Produced at a moment when Britain’s public exhibitions were beginning to emerge, Wright’s works stand at the crossroads of art, science and society. The exhibition also includes Enlightenment instruments — such as an orrery and an air pump on loan from the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge — allowing visitors to step into the material world that inspired Wright’s painted dramas. Alongside the canvases, mezzotint prints reveal how his images circulated across Europe, extending his influence far beyond the confines of the gallery wall. In placing Wright within this broader cultural network, From the Shadows repositions him not simply as a painter of light, but as a thinker deeply engaged with the existential concerns of his age. His art reminds us that the pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the mystery it seeks to dispel — that illumination always casts a shadow.
After its London showing, the exhibition will travel to Derby in 2026, returning two of Wright’s masterpieces to his hometown for the first time in eighty years. For the city that gave him both his name and his vision, the homecoming will be more than symbolic: it will restore to Derby the light — and the darkness — that shaped one of Britain’s most original painters. In a world that still oscillates between reason and faith, Wright of Derby: From the Shadows feels more relevant than ever. His canvases, born of curiosity and wonder, invite us to look again at the fragile flame of knowledge — and to remember that enlightenment, like candlelight, glows brightest just before the darkness.
