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Lot Essay
Joseph Wright was unorthodox among his fellow English artists, as while he established his reputation in London, where he trained, he left the capital to spend the greater part of his life in the Midlands. Following spells in Liverpool (1768-71), Italy (1773-75), and Bath (1775-77), where he spent two years attempting to assume Gainsborough’s vacated position as a portraitist to fashionable society, Wright returned to his native Derby in 1778, where he was increasingly moved to paint landscapes, both British and Italian. He was the first English artist to explore the scientific interests of the Industrial Revolution, studying the varying effects of changing light and weather to truthfully observe natural phenomena in his views, without sacrificing aesthetic values like poetry, drama and beauty.
Betraying the influence of such Dutch landscape painters as Aert van der Neer, Wright first treated this view in moonlight in 1792, punctuating the centre of the composition with staffage by the water (The University of Liverpool, on loan to Walker Art Gallery; see B. Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Light, I, London and New York, 1968, pp. 92-93, 272, no. 342; II, p. 216, pl. 344). In the following year, he painted the present canvas, eliminating all unnecessary figural interruptions to focus entirely on atmosphere, with carefully balanced hills to the right emerging from deep shadow, illuminated by the light of the full moon and its reflection on the water to evoke the sublimity and omniscience of the natural world.
Like all of his paintings, Wright created his landscapes indoors, developing the compositions from preliminary sketches made in oils directly on the canvas and incorporating imagery from drawings sketched from life, or from the prints and sketches of others. While he enforced structural coherence and carefully balanced tones in his topographical inventions, his night scenes required even greater leaps of the imagination, as Wright observed in 1787: ‘Moon lights ... are but a sort of guess work w.th me for I cant w.th impunity go out at night to study [them]’ (Letter 77, dated 22 April 1787, in E.E. Barker, ‘Documents Relating to Joseph Wright 'Of Derby' (1734-97)’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, LXXI, 2009, p. 124).
Betraying the influence of such Dutch landscape painters as Aert van der Neer, Wright first treated this view in moonlight in 1792, punctuating the centre of the composition with staffage by the water (The University of Liverpool, on loan to Walker Art Gallery; see B. Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Light, I, London and New York, 1968, pp. 92-93, 272, no. 342; II, p. 216, pl. 344). In the following year, he painted the present canvas, eliminating all unnecessary figural interruptions to focus entirely on atmosphere, with carefully balanced hills to the right emerging from deep shadow, illuminated by the light of the full moon and its reflection on the water to evoke the sublimity and omniscience of the natural world.
Like all of his paintings, Wright created his landscapes indoors, developing the compositions from preliminary sketches made in oils directly on the canvas and incorporating imagery from drawings sketched from life, or from the prints and sketches of others. While he enforced structural coherence and carefully balanced tones in his topographical inventions, his night scenes required even greater leaps of the imagination, as Wright observed in 1787: ‘Moon lights ... are but a sort of guess work w.th me for I cant w.th impunity go out at night to study [them]’ (Letter 77, dated 22 April 1787, in E.E. Barker, ‘Documents Relating to Joseph Wright 'Of Derby' (1734-97)’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, LXXI, 2009, p. 124).