Joseph Wright, Esq. Painter and Gentleman : Painter and Gentleman [1 ed.] 9781443839594, 9781443839143

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Joseph Wright, Esq. Painter and Gentleman

Joseph Wright, Esq. Painter and Gentleman

By

Andrew Graciano

Joseph Wright, Esq. Painter and Gentleman, by Andrew Graciano This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Andrew Graciano All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3914-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3914-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 Surface and Depth Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31 Sources of Wealth: Wright’s Social Status and His Portraits of Industrial Power Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 63 Rousseau, Botany, Medicine: Wright’s Portrait of Brooke Boothby Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 93 Sympathy and Sentiment Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 111 Robins’s Rooms, 1785: Public Virtue, Private Morality Coda ........................................................................................................ 131 Bibliography............................................................................................ 135 Appendix A ............................................................................................. 151 Members of the Derby Philosophical Society Appendix B.............................................................................................. 153 Select Listing from the Derby Philosophical Society Library Catalogue Appendix C.............................................................................................. 155 Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations Appendix D ............................................................................................. 157 Description of Boothby’s Pageant to Honor Fuseli

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1-1. Plate II from John Whitehurst, An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth (London, 1778). Photography courtesy of the University of Virginia Library, Special Collections. Fig. 2-1. M.C. Prestel after Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, A Black Lead Mine in Cumberland (1787). Aquatint. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library, London. Fig. 2-2. Joseph Wright, Francis Hurt, Esq. (1782). Private collection. Fig. 2-3. Arkwright’s Spinning Machine Patent (1769). © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library, London. Fig. 3-1. Joseph Wright, Reclining Figure in Wright’s Italian Sketchbook (May 16, 1774). © The Trustees of the British Museum, London. Fig. 3-2. Francis Seymour Hayden, after Joseph Wright, Edwin, a.k.a. Thomas Hayden (1864). Etching and drypoint. National Gallery, Washington, DC. Fig. 3-3. A Mushroom Frogstool and Puff: Here To-Day and Gone ToMorrow (c. 1780). Engraving. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London. Fig. 3-4. Water Lily (Nymphaea alba). Courtesy of W. Foulsham and Co., Ltd. Fig. 3-5. Kidneywort (Cotyledon umbilicus). Courtesy of W. Foulsham and Co., Ltd. Fig. 3-6. Pilewort, or Celandine Minor (Ranunculus ficaria). Courtesy of W. Foulsham and Co., Ltd. Fig. 4-1. Joseph Wright, The Captive, from Sterne (1774). Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver. Fig. 4-2. Joseph Wright, Maria, from Sterne (1781). © Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby. Fig. 5-1. Joseph Wright, Indian Widow (1784). © Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby. Plate 1-1. Joseph Wright, John Whitehurst, FRS (1782). Private collection. Photograph courtesy of the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby. Plate 1-2. Joseph Wright, Matlock Tor (c. 1778-1780). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

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List of Illustrations

Plate 1-3. Joseph Wright, Rev. and Mrs. Thomas Gisborne (1786). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Plate 1-4. Joseph Wright, Convent in San Cosimato (1786). Private collection. Plate 1-5. Joseph Wright, A View in Dovedale (1786). Private collection. Plate 2-1. Joseph Wright, Self-portrait (c. 1780). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. Plate 2-2. Joseph Wright, Sir Richard Arkwright (1789). © Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby. Plate 3-1. Joseph Wright, Sir Brooke Boothby, Bt. (1781). Tate Britain. Plate 3-2. Sweet Violet (Viola odorata). Reproduced from William Woodville, MD, Medical Botany…. (London, 1742, reprinted 1791). Courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library. Plate 4-1. Joseph Wright, An Experiment on a Bird in the Airpump (1768). © The National Gallery, London. Plate 5-1. Joseph Wright, Penelope, Unravelling Her Web (1784). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Plate 5-2. Joseph Wright, Corinthian Maid (1783-1784). National Gallery, Washington, DC. Paul Mellon Collection.

PREFACE

As an art historian with a personal interest in philosophy, science and economics, it seemed natural for me to research and to write this book on the eighteenth-century English painter Joseph Wright (1734-97). Such interdisciplinary research seems to satisfy both the left and right sides of my brain, a pleasure I discovered as a student that has since become a necessity. Wright of Derby, as he is popularly known, is esteemed the “painter of light,” and his most familiar works are undoubtedly his “candlelights”— conversation pieces composed in dramatic tenebroso. It was two of these paintings that first captured my interest from a purely aesthetic point of view—An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (National Gallery, London, 1768) and A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a Lamp is Put in Place of the Sun (Derby Art Gallery, 1765). Their hyper-naturalism and warm, glowing light inspired an almost religious reverence, while their scientific subjects appealed to my materialist rationalism. They are beautiful pictures of science that seemed to me at the time to be curiously spiritual and mesmerizing. I needed to know more about the artist. Several years of research later, this book is the result of my investigations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are so many deserving of my gratitude for their help and encouragement along the way to publication. My mentor, Christopher Johns, Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt University, has advised and guided me through several years of graduate study and nearly a decade beyond. His time and generosity have been crucial to the formation, development and completion of this project, and for this I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. Over the years, the research and writing of this book have been funded by a variety of sources: The Samuel H. Kress Foundation; The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Walter Read Hovey Memorial Fund; The University of Virginia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; The Yale Center for British Art’s Visiting Fellowship Program; and the University of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences. For their constant help and support, I would also like to thank Jane Wallis, David Fraser, Sarah Jennings, Janine Derbyshire, and the current staff at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Special thanks go to Jane and her husband for their personal kindnesses. I would also like to express my appreciation to the staffs of the Derby Local Studies Library, Derbyshire Record Office in Matlock, Peak District Mines Historical Society in Matlock Bath, Goodluck Mine Preservation Club in Derbyshire, Yale Center for British Art, Liverpool Public Library, Liverpool University, Walker Art Gallery, Wedgwood Archive at Keele University, British Library, Heinz Archive and Library at the National Portrait Gallery in London, National Gallery in London, Tate Britain, British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings, National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Science Museum in London, Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Society, Linnean Society and Geological Society. Thanks are especially due to Matthew Hargraves, Sarah Munday, Gina L. Douglas, Helen Burton, Matthew Craske, and Martin Postle. The editorial staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing has been a model of professionalism and efficiency. Specifically, I would like to thank Amanda Millar, Carol Koulikourdi, and Emily Surrey for their time and efforts.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks also to my students and colleagues, and the staff at the University of South Carolina’s Department of Art, who have provided a cordial and stimulating place to work, as well as to Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, whose generous support ultimately made the completion and illustration of this book possible. And on the home-front, I have been unconditionally supported and loved by my amazing wife and two beautiful children. For this, above all else, I am always grateful.

INTRODUCTION

Several of Wright’s candlelights treat scientific, industrial and philosophical subjects, and for that reason Wright is sometimes perceived as a “scienceful” artist who stood on the threshold of the Industrial Revolution.1 The fact remains, however, that such conversation pieces comprise only a small part of the artist’s early oeuvre; the vast majority of his works are portraits, landscapes, literary and history paintings. Nevertheless, the major focus of scholarly discussion has been engaged with Wright’s candlelight pictures from the 1760s and early 1770s, especially the two paintings previously mentioned in the Preface.2 These works are alternately considered by scholars to be either stylistically retardataire with their insistently tenebrous palettes and dramatic lighting, or innovative in their modern narrative subjects. William Bemrose wrote in 1885 the first published account of the artist’s life and work.3 Heir to his family’s successful Derby printing firm Bemrose and Sons, the author had married a descendant of the painter. The familial and regional connection to the artist prompted Bemrose and other well-heeled Derbeians to pool their financial resources in order to purchase several of Wright’s paintings, which were then exhibited in the local art museum as a manifestation of civic pride. Presumably Bemrose’s publication served to publicize Derby’s famous native son as well as his own philanthropic achievement. The book is valuable for its publication of important correspondence, including several of Wright’s letters from Italy. Bemrose’s descendant, H. Cheney Bemrose, in 1922 co-authored a more popular, conventional, and brief biography of the artist.4 Although this book alludes to the importance and variety of Wright’s social circles, its lack of bibliographical citations and historical documentation makes it of little scholarly value, however entertaining it may be as a romanticized anecdotal biography. The landmark of Wright scholarship, Benedict Nicolson’s two-volume monograph, Joseph Wright of Derby, Painter of Light, was published in 1968.5 Wright’s correspondence with patrons, friends and family; part of his account book; and documentation of his exhibitions all serve to situate the artist at the center of a regional web of patronage, the strands of which appear to radiate outward from the artist to many of the most prominent intellectuals and industrialists in the Midlands.6 Nicolson’s monograph

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includes the traditional sections on the artist’s life and career as well as a catalogue raisonné. What separates it from other artist’s biographies is its separate discussion of Wright’s patrons and friends—who they were, what their intellectual interests were, and with whom they corresponded.7 They are shown to be the centers of their own British, colonial and continental scientific, economic, philosophical, and political webs, connected to such figures as Sir Joseph Banks, Benjamin Franklin, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. There is, however, no sustained attempt to consider Wright or his art within this more resonant historical context. It is only in the realm of aesthetics and artistic style that Wright is somewhat liberated from provincial subordination. The artist’s trip to Italy (1773-75) has been shown to be the cause of a radical stylistic change, his paintings having been influenced by prominent British artists resident in Rome (like George Romney, Ozias Humphrey, and possibly the Swissborn Henry Fuseli). The art of Michelangelo and the cult of antiquity were additionally of critical importance to Wright’s aesthetic development. While his genre scenes of the 1760s, though depicting modern subjects, tend to lend credence to the view of Wright as a peripheral artist, his postItalian pictures embody a progressive Neoclassical aesthetic and often anticipate full-blown Romanticism. Although elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1781, Wright never properly attained full academic status, much to his vexation. Historically this has caused many to view his attempts at a more modern and cosmopolitan style as falling short of the Grand Manner championed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, ironically fixing Wright’s provincial position in the art-historical canon. I believe this is precisely the reason he is best known and revered today for his early candlelight paintings, which tend to be of interest as either marginal curiosities or mere scientific illustrations, while the rest of his oeuvre, for the most part, is comparatively underestimated. The Tate Gallery’s traveling exhibition Wright of Derby in 1990 helped bring the artist and his work to public attention in an attempt to rescue him from near oblivion.8 The show received almost unanimous critical acclaim and was reviewed in numerous artistic, art-historical, scientific, and other academic and popular periodicals. The Derby Museum and Art Gallery lent many of the paintings in its collection, allowing many to see them for the first time. Several paintings had been cleaned for the occasion, and others were temporarily disinterred from private collections. The exhibition and its catalogue, edited by Judy Egerton, were a vast visual improvement over Nicolson’s monograph, allowing one to view the works in good color illustrations.9 Although the Tate catalogue features new and important essays on

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Wright’s painting techniques, frames, and prints after his work, its individual entries offer very few post-Nicolson bibliographical references.10 One of the essays in particular inspired the work at hand: David Fraser’s brief essay, “Joseph Wright of Derby and the Lunar Society,” touches on Wright’s relations with members of that scientific club, particularly John Whitehurst and Erasmus Darwin, but artistically concentrates (typically) on the artist’s early work, The Orrery, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, and Iron Forge.11 Fraser does much to situate these paintings in the appropriate histories of science (natural philosophy), from Sir Isaac Newton to Joseph Addison, and industry, from Sir Richard Arkwright to Josiah Wedgwood and his essay does much to advance our knowledge of the artist. For the present discussion, however, he neither develops the artist’s link with a larger Enlightenment culture vis-à-vis his later works nor does he speculate about any subsequent social or political ramifications such connections may have had. Fraser hinted at the possibility of scientific and industrial influences in Wright’s later landscapes in an earlier article, but seems to have abandoned this tack by 1990.12 The renowned historian of science, Robert Schofield, published in 1963 the most thorough scholarly account of the Lunar Society, which is considered by many art historians to have been the social hub of Wright’s friends and patrons.13 This magisterial study explains in great detail the origins of this enlightened club—how its members came to meet one another—their intellectual, commercial and social pursuits, the group’s apogee, and the reasons for its decline. The footnotes indicate the depth of Schofield’s research and provide valuable references to primary documents, particularly correspondence among the society’s members—both published and unpublished.14 Although his focus is on the Lunar Society’s scientific, industrial, and philosophical achievements and innovations, Schofield inevitably wanders into the larger cultural, economic, and political ramifications of Lunar Society accomplishments. It is a bit surprising, however, that Wright is only cursorily mentioned in a few sentences as the producer of their ultimate signifiers of newly-discovered wealth and social status—their portraits—and not considered in greater depth at least as a painter of aesthetically appealing conversation pieces embodying the members’ common worldview, if not as a social and creative equal who shared their interests. Unfortunately, Wright suffers essentially the same treatment in Jenny Uglow’s more recent and easily readable account of the same group, The Lunar Men.15 In 1997, to commemorate the bicentenary of Wright’s death, the Derby Museum and Art Gallery mounted a special exhibition of the artist’s work,

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including finished and preparatory drawings, figure studies, and letters with marginalia in gouache, pen, ink wash, charcoal, pencil, and chalk. Many of these are published for the first time in the exhibition catalogue, Joseph Wright of Derby, 1734-1797.16 Also of particular importance are the published transcriptions of certain letters from the museum’s collection that are featured in some of the catalogue entries. While many of the letters concern the diurnal business of payment and delivery, several are valuable for their insight into the artist’s working methods, choice of subjects and compositions, and impressions of Rome and Naples. Historical attitudes about Wright of Derby and his work have helped shape recent scholarly opinion about the artist. Although he frequently exhibited his work with the Society of Artists and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Wright lived most of his life in the town of Derby in the East Midlands, the nation’s industrial heartland. Moreover, the perceived taint of a lingering Baroque aesthetic kept his paintings (and Wright) on the art historical periphery of the Reynoldsian ideal upheld by the Royal Academy of Arts, suggesting that, along with distinguishing Wright from other artists with the same name, the “of Derby” moniker was meant to justify and to express such prejudicial attitudes arising from his provincial origins. Wright was not only from Derby, but also for various reasons— friends, family, patrons, and, possibly obstinacy—maintained permanent residence there, as will soon be described, painting until the last years of his life. The tendency, as I have already shown, is still to focus on his pictures from the 1760s as hallmarks of the painter’s oeuvre, which, more often than not, does the artist an art-historical injustice. In such narratives Wright remains a provincial oddity, either damned for his Dutchdependent style or begrudgingly admired for his intriguing (or “quaint”) bourgeois subject matter. Moreover, although he is known to have been friends with such illuminati as William Hayley (poet), Erasmus Darwin (botanist, poet, physician), and John Whitehurst (geologist, clockmaker), Wright is rarely considered for his own intellectual capacity and personal connections to many of the luminaries of Enlightenment Britain. In addition, scholarly perceptions of eighteenth-century Derbyshire and the Midlands region in general are sometimes colored by nineteenth-century anti-industrial, romantic prejudices; by mid-twentieth-century Marxist tendencies to heroicize the working classes of the past;17 and by the present state of post-industrial affairs in these economically depressed, largely working-class areas due in great part to Thatcher/Reagan era economic reforms like the privatization and deregulation of major industries. Wright’s art cannot be properly contextualized if our perception of his

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historical moment is informed by our own postmodern disillusionment with the Industrial Revolution, its environmentally destructive aftermath, and the social breakdown caused by downsizing as privatized industry struggles to survive in a global marketplace. It is for this reason that I have undertaken to (re)contextualize Wright’s later paintings of the 1770s and 80s within the histories of science (natural philosophy), industry, economics, and art. *** In the eighteenth century the English Midlands was home to such enlightened, culturally progressive groups as the Derby Philosophical Society, the Lunar Society of Birmingham, the Lichfield Literary Society, and the Lichfield Botanical Society, among others.18 The members of these philosophical congregations, many with personal and professional links to Wright, corresponded frequently with Enlightenment bigwigs in Britain, on the Continent, and in the Americas—e.g., Sir Joseph Banks, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin, respectively. Therefore, though they may have been provincial by birth and residence, these men were wealthy, well-educated, well-connected, and in many cases politically radical intellectuals who participated in the larger Republic of Letters that served to propagate Enlightenment ideas about science, art, politics, and social progress.19 Previous scholars have made much of the Lunar Society and its ties to renowned Enlightenment figures. The history of science celebrates the group as the heart of the truly progressive, dissenting English Enlightenment, but always seems to leave Wright out of the picture. Historians of art, on the other hand, too often try to force the closeness of the artist to the Lunar Society, sometimes erroneously proclaiming his membership. My own research, however, shows that he may have been acquainted with only a couple of members, while he seems to have been much more intimately tied to those who eventually formed the Derby Philosophical Society. It was Wright’s friend and Lunar Society member Erasmus Darwin who officially founded the Derby Philosophical Society in 1783 after moving to that town from Lichfield, becoming the group’s first president. Where the Lunar Society was a loose network of men who tried their best to meet regularly for dinner on nights of the full moon and kept no formal records, its Derby counterpart and successor was very structured from the outset. A consensual set of bylaws was established in 1784 outlining the purpose of the group. The members met regularly on the first Saturday of

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each month at the King’s Head Inn in Derby. Fines were charged for absenteeism and most members were from out of town. At the core of the group’s function was its scheme for a circulating library in which membership dues would contribute to a fund used to purchase books on various subjects that fell under the heading of natural philosophy: medicine, geology, botany, ethics, economics, politics, chemistry, natural history, and travel. By 1795 the society had collected over three hundred volumes of texts in English, French, German, and Latin, plus subscriptions to several journals, such as the Transactions of the Royal Societies of London, Edinburgh, and Ireland. *** This book explores the extent to which many of the artist’s later landscapes, portraits, and historical scenes are also rooted in contemporary science, industry, and Physiocratic economics in an attempt to underscore the view of Wright as an intellectual painter, whose art tells of his connections and shared interests with many of the members of the Derby Philosophical Society and their acquaintances.20 The five following chapters have taken the form of individual case studies, each of which deals with an aspect of Wright’s post-Italian oeuvre. The first considers the artist’s landscape paintings of Derbyshire in light of contemporaneous geological debates and mining practices. Specifically, I argue that John Whitehurst’s treatise, An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth (1778), was a major factor in Wright’s choice of Derbyshire locations. Arguing that Derbyshire toadstone was, like basalt, of igneous origin, the geologist linked the county’s geology and topography to that of other volcanic regions of Europe. He further explains that an understanding of the ‘subterraneous geography’ of Derbyshire would aid miners in their endeavors. Moreover, British miners had a long tradition of intuiting subterranean mineral fertility by observing the topographical lay of the land, a practice that was codified by William Hooson in an eighteenthcentury mining handbook. Having traveled to Italy in 1774-75, Wright witnessed some seismic similarities first hand in Naples and his obsession thereafter with painting Mt. Vesuvius is well known. I argue that it is no coincidence that many of the artist’s Derbyshire viewpoints correspond with the text and illustrations found in Whitehurst’s important book, or that his landscapes emphasize topographical description and depict locations known to have been minerally rich, artistically joining two modes of seeing—surface observation and penetrating vision. I argue further that his subsequent pairing of an Italian and English landscape for

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the Rev. Thomas Gisborne was an eloquent statement about a universal natural history that paralleled a human history common to both places viz. both the Biblical Flood and the Roman Empire. Chapter Two begins by demonstrating that Wright was, like his patrons, a prosperous landowning gentleman. The artist owned and let property to tenants for agricultural purposes, collected rent and mortgage payments, and made loans of considerable sums to various friends and acquaintances. I argue that, for the most part, after about 1767 he did not need to paint for a living, since the income from rents, loan payments, and a modest inherited annuity was quite adequate. This disproves the common notion that Wright remained in Derby for most of his life simply because he was unable to achieve success as an artist in London. It shows to the contrary that the artist had other concerns and obligations that kept him rooted in Derby as a member of the local land-owning class. Pursuant to this idea, I also examine three of Wright’s Hurt family portraits in relation to property ownership: Francis Hurt (c. 1782), Charles Hurt (c. 1789-90), and Susannah Hurt (c. 1789-90). Property is in some fashion depicted in each of these portraits to indicate the sitters’ sources of wealth—industrial and inherited—as well as to highlight their connections to powerful familial lineages. The Hurts were landed gentry who made a vast fortune in lead mining. Lead mining was a prosperous Physiocratic pursuit in the greater Matlock area during the eighteenth century, with mines even located specifically in Wright’s favorite High Tor. The discovery in Cromford in the late 1770s of a large ingot of lead with an ancient Latin inscription confirmed Pliny’s account of the importance and productivity of Roman-British lead mines in the region. This highlights the ancient historical significance of Wright’s Matlock High Tor paintings of the 1780s, underscoring the parallels of natural and human histories, and elevating Wright’s Derbyshire landscapes nearer the genre of History. The third chapter focuses primarily on one painting: Wright’s Portrait of Brooke Boothby (1781). I demonstrate that the portrait is not merely a straightforward commemoration of Boothby’s publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques (1780), but is also rather subtly ironic when seen through the lenses of eighteenth-century botany and medicine. I argue that the lynchpin of the irony is the tension between the utility and the pleasure of botanical study—pharmacology and leisured connoisseurship—that seems to have preoccupied Rousseau and polarized Boothby and Erasmus Darwin. By identifying the prominent plants in the painting and discovering their contemporary medicinal value in the treatment of melancholy, the irony is made plain. Wright’s own basic

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knowledge of medicine and possibly botany makes such a purposeful twist plausible. Taking David Solkin’s ideas as a point of departure, I argue in Chapter Four that the conflation of moral and natural philosophy in Wright’s oeuvre did not arise solely from the aesthetic theories of the third earl of Shaftesbury or those of George Turnbull.21 I demonstrate that the literature of natural philosophy provided, in theories about sensibility and sympathy, a philosophical basis for such conflation—particularly from among Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, like Turnbull’s student Thomas Reid as well as Adam Smith. Feeling sympathy for another living creature was to realize one’s own possession of a soul, a pleasurable experience that simultaneously improved one’s morality. Wright was certainly aware of these philosophical currents, either directly or from his friends who would soon make up the Derby Philosophical Society, whose library later contained the appropriate sources (likely from pre-existing private collections). Capitalizing on these notions, though not entirely in a commercial sense, the artist organized a solo exhibition in London that showcased two pairs of companion pieces that were, I believe, to affect viewers’ sensibilities in such a way as to elicit sympathy and the elevation of their moral consciousness. This exhibition and its didactic purpose are the subject of Chapter Five. Although the five chapters treat such varied subjects as geology, leadmining, property ownership, botany, and sensibility, they are not mutually exclusive. Taken together, they form a panoramic picture of Wright’s intellectual interests—a subject never before considered in depth and in context, presumably because the artist neither attended university nor truly attained full status as a Royal Academician. By connecting the artist in the following chapters to the intellectual concerns common to the later Derby Philosophical Society, I shall begin to extricate his historical reputation from the mire of perceived failure and provincial bias in order to situate his work in the larger historical context of the international Enlightenment.

Notes 1

The term “scienceful artist” owes a great debt to Barbara Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 2 The landmark work in Wright studies is Benedict Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby, Painter of Light (New York: Pantheon Books for the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, 1968). See also: David Fraser, Joseph Wright of Derby (Derby: English Life Publications, 1979); Idem., “Joseph Wright of Derby and the Lunar Society: An Essay on the Artist’s Connections with Science and Industry,”

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Wright of Derby, ed. Judy Egerton (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1990): 1523; Egerton, ed., Wright of Derby (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1990); David Solkin, “Joseph Wright of Derby and the Power of the Aesthetic,” in Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992): 214-246; and Idem., “ReWrighting Shaftesbury: The Air Pump and the Limits of Commercial Humanism,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art, 1700-1850, ed. John Barrell. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 73-99. 3 William Bemrose, The Life and Works of Joseph Wright, A.R.A., Commonly Called Wright of Derby (London: Bemrose and Sons, 1885). 4 S.C. Kaines Smith and H. Cheney Bemrose, Wright of Derby (London: Philip Allan and Co., 1922). 5 Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby. 6 The one exhibition that is poorly documented, however, is perhaps his most interesting—Wright’s one-man show at Mr. Robins’ Rooms at Covent Garden, London, of 1785, in which the artist seems to have brought together pairs of didactic companion pieces that had otherwise been dispersed into different collections, some halves remaining unsold. 7 Nicolson, 95-173, except 150-157. 8 The show traveled from the Tate Gallery to the Grand Palais, Paris, and finally to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ironically, the Derby Art Gallery found itself out of its museological league in the bid for the exhibit. 9 Egerton, Wright of Derby. The color plates of the catalogue are of high quality and large size (2/5 page). 10 Rica Jones, “Wright of Derby’s Techniques of Painting,” in Ibid., 263-272; Paul Mitchell, “Wright’s Picture Frames,” in Ibid., 273-288; and Tim Clayton, “The Engraving and Publication of Prints of Joseph Wright’s Paintings,” in Ibid., 25-30. 11 David Fraser, “Joseph Wright of Derby and the Lunar Society,” in Ibid., 15-23. 12 Fraser, “‘Fields of Radiance’: The Scientific and Industrial Scenes of Joseph Wright,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environs, ed. Dennis Cosgrove and Steven Daniels (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 119-141. 13 Robert Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). 14 Correspondence provides the only documentary record of the topics of discussion among members in and outside meetings because apparently no minutes were ever taken. 15 Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 16 Jane Wallis, Joseph Wright of Derby, 1734-1797 (Derby: Derby Museum and Art Gallery, 1997). 17 This is particularly the case with Francis Klingender’s enthusiastically Marxist interpretation and celebration of Wright’s Iron Forge and Blacksmith’s Shop.

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Introduction

Schofield’s is the definitive study of the Lunar Society. He also discusses the Lichfield Literary Society, the Lichfield Botanical Society, and the Derby Philsophical Society. See also Maxwell Craven, John Whitehurst of Derby: Clockmaker and Scientist, 1713-88 (Derby: Breedon Books, 1996); Desmond King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution: The Life and Genius of Erasmus Darwin (London: Faber and Faber, 1977); Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain, 1660-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin, Chiefly During His Residence in Lichfield, With Anecdotes of His Friends and Criticisms on His Writings (Philadelphia: Classic Press, 1804). 19 For information about the Republic of Letters in general see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 1-68 passim. See the following for specifics about how the Republic of Letters functioned among the scientific communities in Britain and on the Continent: John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Idem., Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665-1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and L. Pearce Williams and Henry John Steffens, eds., The History of Science in Western Civilization: Volume II: The Scientific Revolution (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978). 20 Much attention has been paid to Wright’s connections to the Lunar Society of Birmingham; however, my research indicates that the group that would become the Derby Philosophical Society in 1783 was, for some time before, a more directly relevant and local resource for the artist. For further information about the Lunar Society of Birmingham and its overlapping membership in other societies, including the Philosophical Society of Derby, the Royal Society of London, the Linnean Society, Anna Seward’s literary circle at Lichfield, and the Lichfield Botanic Society, etc., see Robert Schofield, The Lunar Society; Henry Carrington Bolton, ed., Scientific Correspondence of Joseph Priestley (New York, 1892), Appendix II; and Gascoigne, Joseph Banks. 21 Solkin, Painting for Money, chapter 6, passim, and Ibid., “ReWrighting Shaftesbury,” pp. 73-99.

CHAPTER ONE SURFACE AND DEPTH

The larger cultural context of geological theory and its industrial applications in late eighteenth-century Britain raise questions about the roles and meanings of Joseph Wright’s landscape paintings from this period. As scientific theories about the origins of the Earth came to have economic and cultural significance, the artist’s portraits and landscape depictions also embodied the otherwise unseen social status and intellectual interests of the painter and his patrons. This chapter will discuss Wright’s landscape paintings in light of John Whitehurst’s geological theory and its application to the mining industry, raising the point that the epistemological difference between (artistically) visualizing the surface and (scientifically) penetrating the subterraneous depths did not adhere to such clearly defined distinctions at the time. Such a reevaluation of the visual relationship between surface and depth in this context forces a reassessment of the relationship of landscape painting to real property ownership, industry and national wealth.

Scientific Society Both the Lunar Society of Birmingham and especially the Derby Philosophical Society are of particular importance in Wright studies because many of their participants were the artist’s patrons and personal friends. For example, Brooke Boothby, Dr. John Beridge, Rev. Thomas Gisborne, Jedediah Strutt, Rev. Charles Hope, Rev. D’Ewes Coke, Charles Hurt and Josiah Wedgwood were all members of the latter group. Indeed, several others were members of both societies. Among them was Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who founded the Derby Philosophical Society and was its first President. Darwin’s court of philosophers met regularly each month. The group’s importance lay in its scheme for a private circulating library, which gives the historian insight into the philosophical culture of the organization.1

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Chapter One

As a group the Lunar Society was less formal than its later Derby counterpart, meeting at a member’s house on nights with a full moon to discuss over supper any number of scientific and/or industrial issues.2 Unfortunately, no minutes were ever kept, owing more to the informality of the proceedings than to a desire for secrecy. The topics of conversation have occasionally been disclosed in surviving correspondence, which freely include mentioning of and discussion about points made at table. Many of the Lunar men were industrial entrepreneurs who represented that relatively new segment of British society usually designated the “rising middle class.” Their scientific discussions were often in the service of business ventures, which they would bring up at the meetings in an effort to solicit advice from one another.3 For example, Josiah Wedgwood, a frequent guest of the Lunar Society and eventual member of the DPS, wished to construct a canal connecting the Trent and Mersey rivers to aid transport of his pottery product, which tended to break when carried over land. Suggestions about the logistics of canal building as well as lobbying support in parliamentary hearings on the subject came from his friends in the Lunar Society. In turn, as a bonus, the digging of the canal provided Wedgwood and John Whitehurst with geological, mineralogical, and fossil specimens for their uses. From as early as 1767 the two men had struck a deal to that effect: “[Whitehurst] hath set his miners to work to put by for me various samples of Earths and Clays, & I am to furnish him with all the curious productions, or facts I can pick up from the cuting [sic] of our Canal.”4 The potter had a fossil collection and used different minerals and rock substances in chemical experiments related to his earthenware pottery—for utilitarian and decorative glazes, coloristic effects in the clay itself, and as emulsifiers to add strength and durability to the final product. Whitehurst, however, was interested in empirical fact-gathering for his theory of the origins of the earth—a treatise published in 1778 and added to the library catalogue of the Derby Philosophical Society by 1789.5 Not merely an abstract, philosophical theory, the book includes a very practical component; the appendix deals specifically with the subterraneous geography of Derbyshire, including engraved, cross-sectional illustrations made by the author showing the layers of rock strata in specific locations. His purpose was not only “to excite philosophers to exert themselves in researches of so much importance,” but also to aid all those industries dependent on mineral yields—particularly mining (lead, copper, iron, and coal)—and their metallic products.6 In the appended, taxonomic discussion of the subterraneous geography of Derbyshire, Whitehurst highlights the economic importance of his work:

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I am fully persuaded in my own mind, that if the strata in all mineral countries were faithfully represented by section, it would furnish the miners with superior ideas of their respective works, and enable them to proceed in their works with more propriety [and efficiency]. It would also be of peculiar satisfaction to the proprietors of mines, to see sections of the strata, with the nature and quality of each bed. To render these observations of more general utility to Subterraneous Geography, it would contribute much to register all strata cut through [i.e., stratigraphically], and their productions, whether in digging for copper, coals, lead, iron or water; for the more general the observations, the more certain the inferences deduced from them.7

Many landowners in Derbyshire had some financial interest in the mining industry, especially lead.8 For instance, before unexpectedly inheriting his family’s estate at Alderwasley, Francis Hurt, Esq. had already made his fortune in the lead industry—owning mines and smelting facilities in the Wapentake of Wirksworth and Liberty of Crich (both in Derbyshire)—which he bequeathed to his sons Charles and Francis. While Wright’s Portrait of Francis Hurt [Fig. 2-2] shows the elder industrialist seated at a table on which sits a raw piece of galena,9 his later painting of son Charles (private collection, c. 1789) is often described as a picture of a gentleman of leisure, showing him as a young member of the landed gentry. Whitehurst’s friends were among those industrialists dependent on the metals produced from the mined ore. Matthew Boulton’s factory at Soho, which was engaged in the business of making metal buttons, buckles and decorative ormolu pieces, is a case in point. Boulton, too, in partnership with James Watt, owned significant shares in Cornish copper mines, as did Mrs. Ashton of Liverpool, whose portrait Wright also painted. Whitehurst was himself a shareholder in Anthony Tissington’s very successful mining company, which owned coal, copper and lead mines in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Durham, and Scotland.10 What clearly separated the members of the Lunar Society from natural philosophers of previous periods was that their brand of empirical, scientific rationalism was unabashedly in the service of their private economic and political agendas. However, I argue there were also broader issues of an economic nature embedded in these geological concerns and since by 1778 the Lunar Society was pretty much defunct, the nebulous group that would later become the DPS is of more critical importance viz. understanding the role of Wright and his art within this nexus. The true measure of a nation’s wealth was believed by French physiocrats to lie in the value of its natural resources.11 But Adam Smith, the father of British Classical economics, disagreed with the French economists who believed

4

Chapter One

that agricultural production was the only true source of wealth, positing the notion that the definition of agriculture should extend to the ‘farming’ of minerals, and that of production to include manufacture. He described the role of metal in the national economy in terms of international trade: The value of a coal-mine to the proprietor depends frequently as much upon its situation as upon its fertility. That of a metallick mine depends more upon its fertility, and less upon its situation. The coarse, and still more the precious metals, when separated from the ore, are so valuable that they can generally bear the expence of a very long land, and of the most distant sea-carriage. Their market is not confined to the countries in the neighbourhood of the mine, but extends to the whole world.12

This sentiment was echoed by Wright’s close friend, sketching partner, and patron, the Reverend Thomas Gisborne, in 1794: Enlarged and liberal principles of commerce are those which promise to a state, in proportion as they are observed in its intercourse with others, the greatest national advantages; and hold out a prospect no less flattering, of accelerating the improvement and augmenting the happiness of the whole earth…. [These] properly fall under the investigation of writers on subjects of political oeconomy. And they have been investigated by Dr. Adam Smith, in his celebrated work On the Causes of the Wealth of Nations….13

The facts that the Derby Philosophical Society library by 1789 included Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and that Gisborne (a member) makes explicit mention of it in 1794, indicate that such modern, progressive economic ideas were common currency among Wright’s circle of friends and patrons.14 Moreover, the artist’s “Account Book” (in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery Heinz Archive and Library) shows the artist’s own revenues from enclosed property he owned and leased to tenant farmers. The economic advantages and instructions on how to proceed with acuity in this business were featured in both Smith’s and Gisborne’s books. It is, therefore, not much of a stretch to believe the painter shared many of these physiocratic interests with his friends and patrons.

Seeing Rock as Visible History While it may be said that Whitehurst’s Inquiry responded to the Lunar Society’s scientific and entrepreneurial concerns, its timely publication allowed it to participate in a developing vogue for geological study in late

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eighteenth-century Britain. The general interest was inspired by myriad cultural and natural phenomena, including a growing concern with landscape aesthetics, both painted and real; the rediscovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which had been buried by volcanic eruption; the Lisbon earthquake of 1755; the numerous eruptions of Mounts Aetna and Vesuvius in modern times; and other seismic phenomena. Britons abroad became particularly fascinated with the sublimity of volcanic activity. Distinguished Grand Tourists often extended their itinerary to southern Italy in hopes that the British Envoy to the King of Naples, Sir William Hamilton, would take them on expeditions up the cone of Vesuvius and to the excavations at Pompeii. At home, they satisfied their curiosity by subscribing to numerous books on natural philosophy.15 Roy Porter has contextualized the popularization of geology in Britain by examining evidence in eighteenth-century literature. Popular scientific writing served to bring geological knowledge to a wider, less specialized audience, summarizing and reviewing the latest theories and publications for the educated amateur. The Monthly Review, published since 1749, is one example to which internationally renowned geologists like JeanAndré de Luc were occasional contributors.16 Topographical studies and the larger genre of travel literature also served to rouse interest in the geological wonders of Nature, particularly in the local British landscape. Of these investigations Porter wrote: [G]eographical works, local natural history, antiquarian studies, guidebooks, maps, scenic prints, landscape painting, and above all, the gigantic literature of travel… [were] deeply rooted in contemporary society. Travelling for pleasure expanded greatly throughout the century, both within Britain, on the Continent and on voyages of exploration throughout the globe, facilitated by (and reciprocally creating) improvements in roads, transport, [and] inns…. Resorts sprang up in scenically spectacular mountain areas, especially near curative springs [e.g., Matlock Bath]. In mid-century the Peak District was the major centre. Guided tours of Derbyshire caves were offered to musical accompaniment. Souvenir shops sold mineral items, from pieces of Blue John to systematic mineral and fossil collections…. In addition, regional improvements, local pride and provincial economic promotions also sustained interest in local landscape…. Popularization did not in itself directly create a new science, ‘geology’. Rather, it helped create a taste for external Nature—both as an aesthetic experience and as rational exploration and local pride. Landscape had lost its terrors, and was becoming a kind of scientific playground, open to all.17

6

Chapter One

Porter goes on to examine the growing popularity of Derbyshire natural history evidenced in such publications as James Pilkington’s A View of the Present State of Derbyshire (1789).18 Whitehurst’s book is also included among them, but it is different from the rest. An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth, as the full title indicates, ambitiously concerns itself with the origin of the planet. The author’s field research, data, and observations developed into a theory of Earth’s evolutionary history from God’s creation to the present—Genesis to Enlightenment. The theory hinges on Whitehurst’s belief in a primary volcanic cause to explain the planet’s present appearance. In proposing such a theoretical model the author entered into an already existing debate between two scientific camps—the Neptunists and the Vulcanists. The former were followers of Abraham Werner, professor of natural philosophy at the Bergakademie in Freiburg, who explained that rocks and continents originated from a series of sedimentary deposits that had precipitated from a universal ocean over the vast course of time.19 The latter, led on the Continent by French scientist Barthelémie Faujas de Saint-Fond, thought volcanic eruptions and quakes caused dramatic planetary upheaval, leaving water-filled chasms (oceans, lakes, etc.) separated by igneous and sedimental rock formations (islands, continents, etc.). Whitehurst sympathized with the Vulcanists. On a microcosmic level the debate centered on the crucial, absorbing question of whether basalt was of volcanic or aqueous origin. The issue, known as “the basalt controversy,” was often raised in scientific travel accounts, which provided the reading public with information and illustrations of places of geological interest.20 For example, Sir Joseph Banks published an account of his 1772 voyage to the Isle of Staffa (off the coast of Scotland) in Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides in 1776 that combined “picturesque scenepainting with considerable precision of mineral description.”21 When writing about the hexagonal, crystalline, basalt columns that make up the subterraneous foundation of the island, forming the celebrated ‘Fingal’s Cave’, Banks did not take sides on the issue of their possible volcanic origin. In 1784, however, the famed French naturalist Saint-Fond visited Staffa, publishing his findings in favor of the volcanic origin of basalt in Voyages en Angleterre, en Ecosse, et aux Iles Hebrides in 1797. His views were already familiar in Britain among his correspondents in both the Lunar and Royal Societies. Interestingly enough, Saint-Fond visited Whitehurst in London on his way to Staffa, disputing the Derby scientist’s theory of the volcanic origin of toadstone—a brownish-green igneous rock found among layers of mineral-bearing strata throughout Derbyshire—

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maintaining instead that it was formed by aqueous sedimentary deposits, and thus taking a strong Neptunist position.22 Another Vulcanist, Sir William Hamilton, published an account of an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1775 that was later used to argue for the volcanic origin of basalt, particularly when Saint-Fond convincingly demonstrated how the basalt columns of Staffa were not unlike basalt outcroppings found on the Continent. Concerning the macrocosmic ramifications of such arguments, both Charlotte Klonk and Porter point out that neither Vulcanism nor Neptunism were considered inconsistent with Christian theology. Volcanic and seismic activities, including the eighteenth-century eruptions of Vesuvius and Aetna and the Lisbon earthquake, were often cited as evidence of God’s presence and as warnings of an approaching day of judgment. Neptunism, on the other hand, fit easily into the Old Testament account of the Noachian Flood. But this was not the case for the theory introduced by Scottish geologist James Hutton, whose approach caused a scientific schism. Having been a friend of both Darwin and Whitehurst and well acquainted with the Lunar and Derby Philosophical Societies, his work deserves some explanation and comparison to that of Whitehurst. Although Hutton’s Theory of the Earth was not fully published until 1795, his ideas were already in circulation in the form of essays that appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh as early as 1788, not to mention his 1785 dissertation from the University of Edinburgh on the same subject, a copy of which was acquired by the Derby Philosophical Society before 1793.23 Hutton argued that natural history, not human records, would evidence the true history of Earth, disregarding the biblical account of Creation as a source of scientific/historical information. As a Deist, he believed the perfection of God’s creation—Earth—was manifested in its ever-changing, continuing, and self-sufficient existence. Earth was a living planet in a constant state of cyclical (de/re)generation. Klonk writes, quoting Hutton: “New continents were forever being naturally created out of the debris of former ones, [Hutton] thought, and the earth might wheel on indefinitely with ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’”24 For Hutton there was a perfect economy of Nature in which the Earth was able to recover its losses naturally by means of regeneration and change.25 As one might expect Hutton and his followers came under theological fire for their disregard of biblical history and were accused of the worst kind of heresy—atheism—although the Scot claimed to be a Deist.26 Huttonianism met not only with accusations of religious impiety, but also

8

Chapter One

after 1789 political suspicion. The idea of a godless planet in a constant state of geological flux (read Revolution) was too radical for those Britons who were genuinely frightened by the atheistic Republicanism then underway across the Channel. For them Huttonianism dangerously justified the French Revolution as a natural inevitability, as global progress. Among those ‘Scriptural’ geologists who opposed Huttonianism were Richard Kirwan and Jean-André de Luc, who supported a traditional view in their later geological publications—what Porter calls ‘directionalist, catastrophist, Biblical theories of the Earth.’27 Barbara Maria Stafford argues that with the development of scientific geology in the eighteenth century, the real landscape came to be understood as an open book that could be read without cultural bias. Indeed, Whitehurst himself wrote, “the book of Nature is open to all men, and perhaps in no part of the world more so than in Derbyshire.”28 Reading the book of Nature in this case is different from the chiromancy of Paracelsus, who advised his followers to read from two books: Nature and the Bible. While he believed that natural forms hid the mystical relationship between the microcosmic earth and the macrocosmic heavens, which was only revealed to alchemists who possessed the secrets of hermetic knowledge, eighteenth-century geologists like Whitehurst and Hutton began to ‘read’ the landscape as a self-contained historical text made up of natural ‘hieroglyphs’. The strata and decay of rock formations told the story of their history: natural history. Only Hutton, taking his cue from Buffon, achieved what Whitehurst advocated in theory: to look at the data at hand (the book of nature), make general observations, and deduce cogent principles about its history and operations.29 Whitehurst attempted to explain the analogical origins of toadstone and the earth as a whole by the appearance of rocky outcroppings and stratigraphy by means of what is now called comparative petrology. At the same time, he also projected the story of Creation onto the book of Nature, forcing them together. As a result, the bulk of his text is an imperfectly harmonized, macrocosmic theory that turns on the microcosmic, practical appendix. Thus, the book begins with the macrocosm and ends with the microcosm, while the logic of the argument works in the other direction; the similarity of toadstone to other igneous rock led to the author’s belief that the local Derbyshire stone was likewise volcanic and further supported larger arguments about the origins of the planet already in circulation. Whitehurst, in a sense, wrote his book backwards; however, Stafford points out that it was the ‘visual archaeology of penetration’ that made the voyage into substance possible, and thus for singular truths to be

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observed (in the form of minerals, crevices, strata, etc.) and, from them, more complex theories to be developed: …[I]t was thought that the method of inductive discovery— implemented through the process of voyaging into matter—would, in the fullness of time, unmask nature. Inextricably conjoined with the visual archaeology of penetration was the momentous finding…that the individual components of matter are eloquent of their own history. During the Enlightenment it was no longer simply a question of divinely allegorizing nature…. Rather, there was the recognition that the myriad particularities of this world constitute a concrete text laying bare to the eye of the natural historian a physical language embedded in marks, traces, images, imprints, and impressions that articulates their innermost substance…. The natural hieroglyph, from its tersest, most primitive embodiment in the facture of the meanest mineral to its sublimely singular incarnation as aged rock or primeval tree, contains plastic clues lodged within its very medium not only to its own material history but also to the creative manner and method of a detranscendentalized, nonauthorial nature at work.30

The ‘plastic clues’ of fossil remains and igneous rock led to Whitehurst’s deductions about the natural history of Derbyshire. For instance, because the top layers of examined strata had only coal and vegetable materials and terrestrial fossils, but no evidence of marine life, while the opposite was true of lower layers, he reasoned that the strata containing “marine productions only… must certainly have been formed whilst the sea covered the earth… and those containing vegetables and no marine exuviae must have been formed after the earth became habitable.”31 Therefore, like the Neptunists, he came to believe that a universal ocean inhabited by marine animals initially covered the surface of Earth. The tides subsided from the lunar pull, exposing small landmasses. These islands fostered animal and vegetable life. Over time, however, a central fire burning at the planet’s core caused an increase in subterraneous temperature. The water in the seabed was turned into highpressure steam that burst forth in a violent action, causing, Whitehurst believed, the Noachian deluge.32 The upturned seabeds formed new continents while the earlier islands became the ocean floor. It was a catastrophic revolution of Nature. In his attempt to reconcile natural history with the biblical account, Whitehurst seems to be on the side of the so-called Scriptural geologists. But as Porter rightly points out, the Derby geologist was neither Neptunist nor Scriptural. Despite his debt to a traditional world-view:

10

Chapter One Whitehurst had moved beyond the seventeenth-century theorists. Though he argued that his theory harmonized with Genesis, he offered almost no analysis of Scripture (or of pagan philosophy)…. Indeed, in some ways his theory flew in the face of Genesis, in asserting, for instance, that life was thriving in the oceans before the separation of land and sea…. Whitehurst was also a child of his time in explaining the Deluge… by internal heat powers. The Deluge was deluge secondarily; its primary cause was a universal earthquake-cum-volcano, demonstrating Whitehurst’s Enlightenment emphasis upon an active Earth.33

The belief in a primary volcanic cause links Whitehurst firmly to the Vulcanist camp, while the notion of an active, living Earth looks forward to Hutton’s Theory of the Earth.34 But a crucial point of contention between Hutton and Whitehurst (among others) was the question of whether the Earth continued to operate as actively as it had in the past. Hutton’s belief in a self-sustaining, constantly de/regenerating Earth, gave him no cause to suspect that the planet’s activity had slowed. Whitehurst felt otherwise, writing: Many other instances might be added, to shew that the effects of volcanos [sic], in the early ages of the world, were much superior to those which have happened within the last period of two or three thousand years….35

Although he felt the planet’s flux had mellowed, Whitehurst’s undying interest in volcanoes evidences his awareness of its continued activity. Joseph Wright, too, was fascinated by volcanic activity. Mount Vesuvius, in particular, captured his artistic imagination from 1774 until the end of his life causing him to paint myriad versions of it in eruption. The artist claimed to have witnessed Vesuvius in eruption while visiting Naples though art historians have long since doubted this assertion because there were no large eruptions recorded during the 1770s except that of 1779. But Sir William Hamilton wrote in 1779 that since the great eruption of 1767 the volcano had never been fully dormant and there had been at least nine eruptions of considerable size.36 It is, therefore, very possible that Wright did in fact witness eruptive activity that certainly would have impressed him. Such a fiery blast would have undoubtedly played into his well-known aesthetic concern with the effects of light, but the geological and economic importance that Whitehurst attached to volcanic knowledge was not lost on Wright and must have been a factor not only in the painter’s depictions of Vesuvius, but also in those of Derbyshire landscapes.

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Intersecting Viewpoints in Art and Science Wright grew up literally a couple of doors down from Whitehurst’s home on Irongate in Derby, around the corner from the latter’s clockmaking shop on Queen Street. In later years they became close friends, despite their age difference. The painter was certainly aware of the geologist’s research, which spanned over twenty years of fieldwork before culminating in his Inquiry. In a letter to his brother from Rome dated November 11, 1774, Wright implored: “When you see Whitehurst, tell him I wished for his company when on Mount Vesuvius, his thoughts would have center’d in the bowels of the mountain, mine skimmed over the surface only….”37 It is clear that the painter knew Whitehurst to be interested in the geological significance of active volcanoes, and that he was also familiar with the scientist’s Vulcanist theories about the formation of the planet, which centered around toadstone—an igneous rock found in the “bowels” of Derbyshire. Some have taken Wright’s self-characterization here—that he merely skimmed the surface, while Whitehurst plumbed the depths—as evidence of a contemporary epistemological distinction between artistic and scientific points of view,38 between rendering surface detail and seeing with a penetrating gaze.39 But the distinction between these two modes of seeing was not so definite in the actual practice of mining in eighteenth-century Britain: to an experienced miner, in fact, and certainly to Whitehurst, too, the “lay of the land”—its topography—was often believed to be a reliable indicator of what was beneath. This view of surface and subsurface offers new possibilities for contextualizing Wright’s work, particularly his Derbyshire landscapes. In his Portrait of John Whitehurst, FRS [Plate 1-1] Wright paints his subject frankly, in half-length, seated at his drafting table. The erupting volcano (certainly Vesuvius), seen through the window at right, gives it the air and significance of a Grand Tour portrait. The scientist is shown looking up, as though interrupted from his cross-sectional drawing of the strata of Matlock High-Tor. The portrait commemorates two related events: the publication of An Inquiry and the author’s subsequent election to the Royal Society of London. The juxtaposition of a volcano with the sectional drawing of Matlock High-Tor, which appears in engraved form at the back of the appendix to Whitehurst’s book, hints visually at the scientist’s belief in the igneous origin of toadstone, found between the mineral-bearing layers of strata in his illustration.40 The geologist theorized that toadstone:

12

Chapter One is actual lava, and flowed from a volcano whose funnel, or shaft, did not approach the open air, but disgorged its fiery contents between the strata in all directions. Another remarkable phenomenon accompanying Derbyshire lava is that the stratum of clay lying under [it]… is apparently burnt, as much as an earthen pot or brick….41

The clever compositional metaphor in the painting was most likely the artist’s idea, indicating his familiarity with and understanding of the sitter’s geological theories, linking the microcosmic toadstone to the macrocosmic volcano.42 I believe this to be the case because the visual connection also lends itself to a comparison of the Derbyshire landscape to that of southern Italy, which is a recurring theme in Wright’s postItalian landscape paintings of the 1780s and 90s.43 I will come back to this point in due course. Although it depicts an abstracted, graph-like, cross-sectional rendering of Matlock High-Tor, Whitehurst’s drawing for Plate II of An Inquiry [Fig. 1-1] is taken from a specific point of view: looking North, with the cliff-face of Matlock Tor on the right-hand side of the River Derwent, and Masson hill sloping upwards to the left. Stafford writes of the aesthetics of such scientific illustration: Although the matter to be communicated is paramount in an aesthetic of information, the seemingly unmediated, ‘artless’ form of its transmission is instrumental in producing the effect of verisimilitude. Such a probative style necessarily avoids connotative associations and conspicuous metaphors, since its terms imply an isomorphic relationship between the phenomenal world and the representation.44

The streamlined image of reality is free of ‘metaphorical extravagance’ and cultivates in Stafford’s words a ‘masculine, plain language’ of visual description. Whitehurst’s engraving must have been done directly after the drawing, and the printed illustration appears in reverse. That Wright’s paintings of Matlock High-Tor by moonlight (dated to c. 1778-80), and by daylight (mid-1780s) are taken from the same vantage point is surely no coincidence. His Matlock Tor by Daylight [Plate 1-2] was painted about the same time as his portrait of Whitehurst, and it shows how the artist grew increasingly less dependent on melodramatic effects to achieve a worthy landscape, a change that I argue is not unlike that in the language of scientific visual description noted by Stafford.45 The broken (blasted?) tree on the left is the only obvious compositional device, marking a foreground to help make convincing the perspectival illusion of the river. The landscape is otherwise a carefully rendered depiction of the

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topographical surface of the very spot with which Whitehurst concerned himself, evoking the ‘bowels’ depicted by the geologist. Fraser writes about the iconographic parallels in the works of Wright and Whitehurst: Wright’s Derbyshire views regularly feature the distinctive limestone cliffs and crags discussed by Whitehurst. Wright probably felt the same standing on Matlock High Tor as he did on Vesuvius; whereas his thoughts were seized by appearances, Whitehurst’s probed into the bowels of the earth…. To illustrate this structural analysis of the landscape in the Inquiry Whitehurst published a stratigraphic section of Matlock High Tor [among other places], while Wright often used the raking light of an evening effect to articulate the surface of a limestone cliff, or scumbles and glazes to render the texture of stone.46

Fig. 1-1. Plate II from John Whitehurst, An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth (London, 1778). Photography courtesy of the University of Virginia Library, Special Collections.

Indeed, the painter was not the only one concerned with topographical or surface appearances. William Hooson, an eighteenth-century lead miner, described an experienced miner’s ability to ‘read’ the ‘Signs and Symptoms’ of the land as being much like the way a doctor interprets those of a patient; the surface details indicating what lay beneath.47 In this scenario, topography becomes the physiognomy of the land in which the external appearance is symptomatic of a hidden cause. Physiognomic signs in humans were believed by many in the eighteenth century to be clues to human nature, intellectual ability and predisposition to vice.

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Johann Caspar Lavater codified physiognomic profile types in his Physiognomische Fragmente (1775-1778) and his system, based on trained visual analysis, has since been likened to connoisseurship in the visual arts.48 Similarly, it may have been that experienced miners thought themselves able to see as Hooson claimed was possible, and, therefore, to ‘read’ the topographical clues in both painted and real landscapes. Whether they were involved in the mining industry or not, Wright’s Derbyshire patrons, nevertheless, would certainly have recognized the local locations depicted and known of their mineralogical and geological significance. In both physiognomy and topographical analysis, the surface characteristics or ‘symptoms’ are observed as individual parts that, when taken together, allow an interpretation or ‘diagnosis’ to be made. Therefore, I argue that the meanings ascribed to the location by Whitehurst’s deductions, delineated in his stratigraphic cross-section, should be understood to carry over into Wright’s landscape; the painting being the artful, parallel achievement of a similar aesthetic of information. The same may be said about the artist’s other landscape paintings of locations discussed and/or illustrated by the geologist: e.g., Dovedale, Matlock Dale, Chee Tor, etc. These include: View in Dovedale (1786); Landscape with Figures and Cart, with Matlock High Tor in the Distance (c. 1790); and View in Matlock Dale, Looking South to Black Rock Escarpment (c. 1780-85), among others.

Parallel Landscapes, Derbyshire and Italy The geological significance of Derbyshire had to do with Whitehurst’s theory about the igneous origin of toadstone and the origin of the Earth; however, the subtext of this had in part to do with tourism. The Derby geologist arrived at his conclusion by what is now called comparative petrology—the study of similarities and differences in texture and structure of rock from varying spatial and temporal origin—through which he recognized a marked likeness between toadstone and recent lavas such as those from Vesuvius.49 If local toadstone were widely accepted as being volcanic in nature, then the landscape of the Midlands could be justly compared to that of Italy, which was of course a huge tourist attraction, despite dramatic climatic differences. The Midlands and Peak Country were arguably popular tourist spots already, as evidenced by the proliferation of such travel narratives as James Pilkington’s A View of the Present State of Derbyshire in which Darwin’s account of the curative benefits of the waters of Buxton and Matlock appears.50 The connection to

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the continent, specifically to the geological splendor that was Italy, was perhaps an attempt to justify and embellish Derbyshire’s popularity, making it in turn a worthy subject for landscape depiction. Painters like Richard Wilson had only recently awakened the public to the aesthetic value of Britain’s indigenous Roman and medieval ruins.51 Although the first springs at Matlock were not discovered until 1698, the fact that the medicinal and bathing history of the waters at Buxton dated back to the Roman era helped strengthen the county’s physical ties with the cultural and natural history of the Continent.52 Pilkington claims that the bathhouses at Matlock, which were built to accommodate 150 people, were inadequate to handle seasonal demands because they were such a popular tourist attraction.53 The abundance of easily accessible caverns and chasms in Derbyshire is another point addressed by the natural historian, although none were officially opened to the public until 1800; prior to that time entrance was free of charge and at one’s own risk.54 He testifies to their popularity among curious explorers, writing that some of their accounts “have been given with a tolerable degree of accuracy, while others have been set off with such exaggerated circumstances of terror and astonishment as cannot fail of raising false notions of these subterraneous situations.” Contrarily, the author assures the reader that he gives the best description possible, formed “from my own observation….”55 He goes on to illustrate verbally in considerable detail several locations, including Peak’s Hole in Castleton and Poole’s Hole near Buxton. The mouth of the former is described as opening with ‘grandeur and magnificence,’ forming a regularly shaped arch, which is “tolerable light [sic.] and inhabited by a number of poor people.”56 The banditti in John Hamilton Mortimer’s works, and perhaps in Salvator Rosa’s paintings, must also have reminded Wright of such people, further adding to his cross-cultural associations. We must not forget that the Derby artist was a longtime friend of Mortimer since their days together in the studio of Thomas Hudson and later in their stalwart support of the Society of Artists in the face of the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1778 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg visited Derbyshire to make studies for the theatrical scenes of “The Wonders of Derbyshire,” which opened at Drury Lane in London in 1779.57 It was a breakthrough production in that the pantomime was merely pretence for the exhibition of the landscape scenery, which was the main attraction. The elaborate backdrops, designed and painted by the artist, celebrated the natural and industrial mystique of Derbyshire in a way that only an alchemical mystic like de Loutherbourg could have conceived, the Alsatian artist having

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been a disciple of the infamous, controversial ‘Count Cagliostro,’ socalled Grand Master and founder of the Egyptian Rite.58 Not surprisingly among the subjects of the frequently changing scenery were Matlock High-Tor, Peak’s Hole, and Poole’s Hole. Their awesome mystery must have illustrated perfectly de Loutherbourg’s sublime, alchemical vision. The appearance and popularity of such a pantomime in London indicates the public’s fascination with both Derbyshire’s sublimity on the one hand, and natural history and industry on the other, as well as the widespread acceptance of the possibility to conflate the scientific and the aesthetic through the mixing of real and painted landscapes. The historian of geography Stephen Daniels discusses Wright’s paintings in relation to the cult of tourism surrounding Derbyshire and the Peaks, including everything that attracted the tourist’s gaze: natural history, factories and other industrial phenomena, warm springs, etc.59 His point is crucial, situating the artist’s work not only among the man-made and natural attractions, but also within the larger context of the commodification of culture, where it functioned much like de Loutherbourg’s theatrics and Wedgwood’s classical vases and cameos.60 However, unlike the work of these men, Wright’s Derbyshire landscapes were not explicitly marketed themselves, as Daniels seems to imply, nor did they serve as advertisements for the Midlands region to the uninitiated.61 Rather, the landscapes preached to the choir, appealing to those who lived in or were familiar with the area, or remained unsold. Wright had a ready market. His correspondence indicates that many of his works were sold and commissions arranged by word of mouth among friends; his efforts to sell through exhibition were often disappointing, and he frequently felt unjustly slighted by critics and the Royal Academy of Arts. Outside his relatively rare, understated appearances in London, strangers did not often see his work, except, of course, through the medium of prints. The discerning public, however, clearly preferred to see the paintings. In a letter to the editor of the General Evening Post, dated January 16, 1785, an anonymous admirer complains that Wright rarely exhibits his work in London where more people and artists could see it. For the benefit of those familiar only with his candle-light conversations and portraits, the author goes on to praise the artist’s recent occupation with landscapes, having had to travel afar to view them: I have lately seen some landskips by Mr. Wright at Mr. Gisbons [sic], in Derby, and Mr. Boothby’s, at Ashborne, which would do honour to ye Pencil of Claude Lorraine; which contain ye breadth of Wilson, the masterly touches of Loutherbourg, and ye freshness of Nature. Indeed it is

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generally allow’d that no Painter ever show’d such various powers with equal force as the artist in question.62

Wright’s Visions of Derbyshire and Italy As I mentioned earlier, the comparison of the jagged, mountainous landscape of Italy with that of Derbyshire is a recurring theme throughout Wright’s oeuvre. Benedict Nicolson points out that there exists only one pure landscape painting executed by the artist prior to his Italian sojourn: Rocks with Waterfall (c. 1772, private collection).63 It depicts an unidentified bit of Midlands scenery with rocks and a cascade, and the incongruous inclusion of three small banditti à la Salvator Rosa in the foreground. It is, in fact, not so strange, since Wright had surely seen paintings by the Italian artist in English private collections—the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s collection at Chatsworth contains several, as does Lord Scarsdale’s at Kedleston Hall—and he may have noticed, even at that early date, a certain topographical similarity between Rosa’s Italy and his own Derbyshire. However, Judy Egerton rightly notes that despite the banditti and the concession to the Baroque sublimity of gnarled tree trunks in the upper left, the depiction is ‘too direct and compelling’ to give all credit to Rosa’s work. She suggests Alexander Cozens’ paintings of Matlock as another possible point of departure. Wright may have seen such landscapes at Kedleston. Moreover, Kim Sloan mentions a connection to the work of John Robert Cozens, Alexander’s son: The similarity in subject and approach to the series of chalk drawings of rocks by John Robert Cozens [also of c. 1772] is striking. Like Cozens, Wright positions himself right up against the face of a wall of rocks and makes the texture, shapes, crevices and clinging vegetation the only subject of his painting.64

The drawings of the younger Cozens indeed reveal a similar attempt at rendering topographical details, including surface texture and stratification; however, perhaps due to their medium, they are somehow less convincing than Wright’s rich oil painting.65 In any event, the Midlands-area, craggy cliff face and waterfall are the main visual interests of Wright’s painting, relegating it entirely to the landscape genre, while the inclusion of the banditti serves as a foil for the conflation of Italian and English topography, creating inevitably, and most importantly, a clever visual comparison of the two regions in one picture. Rocks with Waterfall is especially remarkable for its depiction of the cliff face. Wright shows a scientific attention to the details of the rocky

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surface, using heavy impasto and tonal variations of earth-tones, rusts, and greens to achieve a convincing texture, surely achieved by empirical observation.66 One can even make out the layers of rock strata, the likes of which Whitehurst would later describe as “rude and romantic”—“heaps of ruins” in “the utmost confusion and disorder”—evidencing the volcanic tumult that marked the natural history of the East Midlands, not to mention that of southern Italy.67 Another artist, Thomas Jones (17421803), visited Italy in 1776 and, significantly, described at length in his memoir the geological splendor of the mountainous campagna between Gensano and Rome, which reminded him of the landscapes of Richard Wilson, his teacher: This mountainous district… was evidently formed by Volcanic Eruption’s [sic], tho’ long before the Reach of History, as the present face of the Country seems to be the same as what we find it to have been in the earliest Periods of the Romans—The Rocks are composed of a browned Stone in large compact masses, called Peperino (perhaps from its resemblance in Color to ground pepper) which easily yields to the Chissel & consequently much us’d in Masonry…. That this Substance has at one time been in a state of fusion is manifest from the pieces of Charcoal, and calcinated Marble, with other vitrified and heterogeneous Matter that are perpetually discovered in the center of large blocks by sawing them asunder—This Stone is not so hard as the dark grey Lava of Mount Vesuvius or so soft as that cream Color’d Stone about Naples, called Tuffa, but seems to be in Color & Texture, a kind of Medium between both— The number of conic hills so frequent hereabout, & on the Summits of many of which are situated little Towns & which are no more than so many heaps of Cinders covered with a thin Crust of Vegetative earth, is another evidence in favour of the Hypothesis—Add to this those two immense inverted Cones, The Lakes of Albano & Nemi as sufficiently indicating the Craters from whence so many hills have been cast forth.68

When Wright was in Italy he completed only one full-scale landscape painting, believed to be the picture of Vesuvius in the Derby Art Gallery, but made instead quantities of portable drawings, sketches, gouaches, and watercolors. The ones of Italian landscapes were used to jog the painter’s memory as he painted numerous, detailed pictures of these locations throughout the rest of his career. Many of his drawings are highly finished, with detailed notes about the colors, lighting, and types of rock he scrutinized. Thus, when his friend, Rev. Gisborne, the intellectual clergyman and amateur artist, commissioned two landscapes from him, he was able to make one of them Italian and one of Derbyshire. The companion landscapes were done at about the same time that Wright

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painted the double portrait of Reverend Thomas Gisborne and his Wife Mary [Plate 1-3]. The portrait shows the reverend in the clothes of an Anglican cleric seated next to his wife and attended by his faithful dog. He has with him the attributes of an amateur artist—a sketchbook and a pencil. Indeed, it was Gisborne who accompanied Wright on several sketching expeditions in the fashionable Lake District during the last years of the painter’s life.69 By conceiving the Gisborne landscapes as the artistic pairing of the campagna and Dovedale, the artist was making a complex and eloquent visual argument that the two places shared a similar topography, geology, and natural history, which in turn justified their attraction for artists, scientists, and tourists.70 In The Convent of San Cosimato [Plate 1-4] the building is situated on top of a hill at the edge of a cliff, looking down over part of the Claudian Aqueduct near Vicovaro in the Roman Campagna, about thirty-two miles from Rome. The River Anio (or Aniene) flows between the rocky cliffs and the fertile hillsides. The companion piece, View in Dovedale[Plate 1-5], is of a scene closer to home. The River Dove flows between the rocky outcroppings called ‘Tissington’s Spires’ on the left, and the more verdant slope on the right into a sun-lit, olive-colored valley in the distance. The ‘Spires’ were socalled because of their resemblance to medieval church spires, possibly those of St. Mary’s, Tissington, in Derbyshire—although they may have been named for a prominent mining family of the same name. The palette in each painting is similar, relying on earthy browns, olive greens, and shades of gray for the rock. Wright must have been reminded of his familiar Dovedale when confronted with the scene near San Cosimato, and their perceived similarities were made manifest in these companion pieces for Gisborne; Wright deliberately choosing a view in Dovedale that would best enhance the visual congruity of their topographies. In both paintings, Wright pays careful attention to the details of the rocky cliffs, delineating their crags and crevices with an even greater objectivity than his earlier Rocks with Waterfall, dispensing with the painterly bravura of the earlier work. Nicolson has discussed the stylistic change in terms of a shift from the sublime to the picturesque coinciding with the artist’s exposure to Italy—Wright painting away the “barbarity” of nature—while Egerton proposes that the artist was relying less on effect, and more on observation.71 Where artists like Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg invoked the sublime to cloak the wonders of Derbyshire in mystery and drama, playing on one aspect of their popular appeal, Wright’s more empirical vision brings a forthrightness and clarity to his landscapes, much like that for which his portraits are often esteemed. The

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difference in the artists’ aesthetics parallels the gulf between alchemy and natural philosophy that had grown wider over the course of the seventeenth century.72 The vague and confusing language of hermetic alchemists and chemical philosophers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries (e.g., Arnald of Villanova, Paracelcus, John Dee, and Robert Fludd) that shrouded their art in mystery, sophistry, and, at times, charlatanism, was fundamentally at odds with the ethos of rational illumination that came to typify the Enlightenment, which was first introduced in the mechanical philosophies of William Harvey, MD (15781657) and Robert Boyle, FRS (1627-1691). Much of the debate took place in the field of medicine, appropriately enough to interest Wright and the DPS; the former having painted The Alchymist, The Hermit Studying Anatomy, and Galen (now lost), while the membership of the latter was made up mostly of physicians and surgeons. Egerton’s view of Wright’s empirical observation should also be assessed in terms of the geology of the Dove river valley, known to be rich in copper and lead; and that Dovedale was yet another location discussed in Whitehurst’s Inquiry, indicates it was of known significance to theoretical geology. In 1769 William Efford wrote of a Cornish miner’s discovery by means of a method of topographical deduction similar to that advocated by Hooson: Ecton-Hill, that part of it, in which the Mine is situated… [is] next [to] the River Dove, which runs close by…. This Copper-Mine was discovered about thirty years ago, by a Cornish Miner, who in passing over the Hill, accidentally picked up a bit of Ore, annexed to some fine Spar, which that Metal usually adheres to. On viewing the situation, and considering the great height of the Hill, he concluded that vast quantities of Copper-Ore might be found there; and if that should be the case, no place could be more convenient for working it: and therefore he communicated his sentiments and discoveries to some adventurers at Ashburn, who approving the project, applied to the then Duke of Devonshire (grandfather to his present Grace) for a lease to search for Copper on that Hill…. About six months before the decease of the late Duke, (father to his present Grace) the lease expired, and the whole undertaking fell into his Grace’s hands and has ever since continued working to great advantage. To take a view of this stupendous Copper-Mine, you must enter at an Adit at the base of the hill by the river Dove, and proceed about 400 yards, almost in a direct line…. On the opposite side of Ecton-Hill is a Lead Mine, which is likely to turn out to great advantage; the veins of Lead approaching very near to the Copper; and they are driving in an Adit, parallel to the other.73

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In Wright’s View of Dovedale we are faced with a carefully observed rocky landscape, depicting the ‘confusion and disorder’ of the various strata, seen, as in both Wright’s and Whitehurst’s renderings of Matlock Tor, on either side of a river. A physical, historical, and cultural connection to the Continent, specifically to the geological splendor of southern Italy, would both have linked the Derbyshire lead industry to a Georgic ideal and enhanced the county’s touristic popularity. This would in turn enhance its worth as a subject for landscape depiction, as in the Gisborne picture. As has already been mentioned, British landscape painters had only recently embraced the subject of Britain’s indigenous Roman and medieval ruins, rivaling the antiquities present in the work of continental artists like Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Wright’s Derbyshire landscapes are different from the works of the continental artists in that the natural landscape alone recalls human and natural history simultaneously, without overt depictions of ancient monuments, specific figures or narratives. The particular locations Wright chose would have been recognized by his intended audience as places of great mineralogical significance from Roman times forward.74 The paintings may also be said to fulfill Alexander Cozens’s desire that didactic landscapes be made without overt references to history or narrative.75 Taking his own cue from current Vulcanist geological theories that privileged the physical evidence of natural history over written records of human history, such as biblical chronology, Wright substituted a specific human narrative for “readable” topography in his Derbyshire landscapes.76 As I have suggested, the mining industry relied on both the practice of reading topographical signs and on theoretical advances in geological understanding for its successes. Mining had been particularly productive in Derbyshire, providing large fortunes for many entrepreneurial industrialists, members of the landed gentry, and nobility; and it had an ancient pedigree. By the late-eighteenth century, geology had become a popular subject of study for amateurs and members of scientific societies, many of whom had links to mining interests, as noted above. The visual congruency of Wright’s pendant paintings of Dovedale and the Roman campagna, seen against the backdrop of geological theories and the topographical analysis requisite to mining, embody a perceived connection between Derbyshire and southern Italy that was at once about surface and depth, theory and practice, the eighteenth-century present and the ancient past. The artist’s decided tendency toward the careful observation and rendering of local landscapes in the 1780s and 1790s, then, was not merely a stylistic response to his own Italian sojourn, a shift from the

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sublime to the picturesque, but was clearly informed by both the geological theories and practical mining and industrial concerns circulating among the intellectual elite in the East Midlands during the same period.

Notes 1

Derby Philosophical Society, Rules and Catalogue of the Library of the Derby Philosophical Society to December 1793 (Derby: J. Drewry, 1793) and Idem., Catalogue of the Library, c. 1785, and Ledger, 1787-1789, unpublished manuscripts in the collection of the Derby Local Studies Library. See also: R.P. Sturges, “The Membership of the Derby Philosophical Society, 1783-1802,” Midland History (1978, v. IV, nos. 3 and 4): 212-229; Eric Robinson, “The Derby Philosophical Society,” Annals of Science (December 1953): 359-367; and Sturges, “Cultural Life in Derby in the Late Eighteenth Century (c. 1770-1800),” M.A. thesis, Loughborough University of Technology (1968): chapter 6. 2 The full moon allowed for the greatest amount of light to guide the visitors on their journeys home. 3 In Making of Geology, Porter discusses the Lunar Society on p. 97, describing how such members as Whitehurst, Darwin, James Kier, Wedgwood, James Watt, and Boulton took an interest in geological subjects, including analysis of mineral products, fossils, strata, decorative spars, clays, and copper mining. He also describes it as a model for other Midlands societies, and mentions how the members entertained many visiting geologists such as James Hutton, Jean-André de Luc, Johann Jacob Ferber, and Saint-Fond, while keeping up correspondences with many like-minded individuals at home and abroad. See also: Schofield, Lunar Society, 101-102 (Hutton and Ferber), 240-241 (de Luc), 251 and 281-282 (SaintFond). 4 Wedgwood Archive, microfilm letters, vol. III, page 35: Wedgwood to Thomas Bentley (his business partner), 9 April 1769. My italics. 5 John Whitehurst, An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth (London, 1778). Reprinted 1786 and 1794, and in a German edition in 1788. The DPS owned the expanded, second edition, which contained information on the author’s observation of basalt at Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. The list of subscribers to the first edition already included many of the members of the Lunar and Derby Philosophical Societies, who presumably felt it unnecessary to own more than one personal copy. All references here are from the first edition. 6 Ibid., 190. 7 Ibid., 144-145. 8 For information on the politics of the lead-mining industry in the Peak District in the eighteenth century, see Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520-1770 (New York, 1999). The legal evidence for such financial interest among the wealthy in Derbyshire, as well as for the social conflict it

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spawned, may be found in British Library MSS 6681, fols. 335-58; and 6677, fol. 65. 9 Roger Flindall and Andrew Hayes, Caverns and Mines of Matlock Bath. The Nestus Mines: Rutland and Masson Caverns (Buxton: Moorland Publishing Company, 1976), 13: “By far the most important [of the lead minerals found near Matlock Bath] is galena (lead sulphide) which has a density nearly three times that of limestone. It weathers to a dull black but breaks easily into cubes showing a bright metallic luster. Galena sometimes occurs as cubic crystals, occasionally modified by octahedral and other forms….” The lump of galena in the painting is described in accurate detail, showing the darkened outer layer and the exposed lustrous core. 10 Maxwell Craven, Derbeians of Distinction (Derby: Breedon Books, 1998), 203, 215-216. 11 Metals were also a valuable export to the American colonies, where native metals were scarce before widespread industrialization. The dearth of metallic ore was what inspired Franklin to invent a clock that worked with only one spring mechanism. 12 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan, 1776), 211. 13 Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain, Resulting from Their Respective Stations, Professions, and Employments (London: B. and J. White, 1794), 430. The year of publication coincides with the author’s excursions into the Lake District with Wright, indicating that the subject was on Gisborne’s mind during a period of frequent sketching activity with the painter. The two must have discussed this mutual interest. 14 See Smith, 179-191 and Gisborne, 574-583. 15 Indeed, the list of subscribers at the beginning of Whitehurst’s text reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ in eighteenth-century amateur science. 16 Jean-André de Luc, “Letters to Dr. Hutton,” Monthly Review (London: R. Griffiths, 1790, part 2): 206-227, 582-601. 17 Porter, Making of Geology, 102-103. Stephen Daniels discusses Wright’s paintings in the context of travel and tourism in “Joseph Wright and the Spectacle of Power,” in Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993): 4379. 18 Pilkington, A View of the Present State of Derbyshire (Derby: J. Drewery, 1789). Pilkington’s book includes an essay by Erasmus Darwin about the medicinal value of the natural springs at Buxton and Matlock. For more on Darwin’s geological interests, see King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution, 198. 19 Charlotte Klonk, “From Picturesque Travel to Scientific Observation: Artists’ and Geologists’ Voyages to Staffa,” in Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750-1880, ed. Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilcox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997): 212.

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The effect of these travel narratives on landscape painting in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century is discussed in Klonk, “From Picturesque Travel to Scientific Observation:” 205-229; and Idem., Science and the Perception of Nature: British Landscape Art in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 21 Porter, Making of Geology, 113-114. See also Klonk’s discussion of Pennant in “From Picturesque….” 22 Schofield, Lunar Society, 281-282: “Whitehurst wished St. Fond particularly to confirm his identification of toadstone as igneous, for he was justly proud of that and of the accompanying observation of intrusion phenomena. St. Fond, however, seems determined to regard toadstone as ‘trap-stone’ and was as sure as the most convinced Wernerian [a.k.a. Neptunist] that trap was aqueous, not igneous.” 23 Hutton, Abstract of a Dissertation…Concerning the System of the Earth (Edinburgh, 1785), reprinted 1970; “Theory of the Earth,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1788, I, 109-304); The Theory of the Earth, With Proofs and Illustrations, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1795), 3rd vol. published in 1899. 24 Klonk, “From Picturesque,” 213, quoting Hutton, Theory of the Earth, I, 200. 25 Porter, Making of Geology, 107-108: “Certain writers, notably George Hoggart Toulmin and James Hutton, discarded written human testimony as valueless for Earth history…. [P]resent in the thought of [Benôit] de Maillet, le Cat, Whitehurst, [Oliver] Goldsmith, Hutton, and Toulmin was the perception of the independent, and assured, continued existence of the Earth with its own laws, free from theological interference and destruction: here to stay. This of course relates at an ontological level to the influence of Enlightenment notions of Nature in reconstituting understanding of the Earth. For fundamental to Enlightenment thought was a growing belief in the goodness, perfection, self-sufficiency and activity of the natural environment.” 26 John H. Brooke, “Why Did the English Mix Their Science and Their Religion,” in Scienza e Immaginazione nella Cultura Inglese del Settecento, ed. Sergio Rossi (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 1987): 57-78. “The restorative forces by which mountains could be raised he [Hutton] went on to locate in the earth’s central fire. As a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hutton was doing no favours for Christian orthodoxies. His remarks do smack of deism or even pantheism. But, the religious reference is still there. That there were final causes operating nature he ascribed to ‘that infinite Being and superintending mind’.” (70, quoting Hutton, An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the Progress of Reason, 3 vols., Edinburgh, 1794, vol. 2, pp. 415-417.) 27 For information on Kirwan and de Luc, see Schofield, Lunar Society, index. See also: Kirwan, Geological Essays (London, 1799) and de Luc, Letters on the Physical History of the Earth (London, 1831). For further details on the Huttonian controversy see: Roy Porter and Ludmilla Jordanova, eds. Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences (Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1979) and Martin Rudwick, The Great

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Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 28 Whitehurst, preface, i. 29 Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 1984, 286-288. See also Charles Coulston Gillispie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 17901850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), chapters 2 and 3, passim. Gillispie points out that the importance of both Vulcanism and Huttonianism (although he does not distinguish between them) is “the modern and forwardlooking effort to conceive dynamics in accordance with observable fact and to restrict geology to no larger function.” (48) These are the principles advocated, though not practiced, by Whitehurst at such an early stage, and on which the Geological Society of London would be founded in the early nineteenth century. 30 Ibid., 284. 31 Whitehurst, 170. 32 Ibid., Chapter XII, passim. 33 Porter, Making of Geology, 125-126. 34 Trevor Ford, “John Whitehurst, FRS, 1713-1788,” Bulletin of the Peak District Mines Historical Society (October 1974): 362-369. “In France, [Nicolas] Desmarest in 1774 rightly noted the obvious comparison between the extinct volcanoes of the Massif Central and the active volcanoes of Vesuvius and Hecla, and logically extended his argument to recognize detached pieces of volcanic rock as evidence of the former destruction of volcanoes. Whitehurst, however, apparently arrived independently at the same conclusion regarding the former existence of volcanoes in a region where there was no sign of recent volcanic action.” (365) 35 Whitehurst, 83. This comment also hints at the author’s ‘heretical’ belief that the Earth was much older than the human record of biblical history would have the Scripturalists believe. 36 Sir William Hamilton, “An Account of an Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which Happened in August, 1779,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1779: LXX): 43-44. 37 Elizabeth Barker has done an excellent job of compiling and editing Wright’s papers, which were published recently by the Walpole Society. See Barker, “Documents Relating to Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’ (1734-1797),” in The SeventyFirst Volume of the Walpole Society (2009): 1-216. Although I personally consulted the archival documents in 2000-2001 and again in 2004 and 2005, I will also cite Barker’s more easily accessible edition where relevant. Wright’s letter of 11 November 1774 is in the collection of the Derby Local Studies Library. See also Barker, 84, letter 19. 38 See Fraser, “Fields of Radiance,” 126; Richard Hamblyn, “Private Cabinets and Popular Geology: The British Audiences for Volcanoes in the Eighteenth Century,” in Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon, eds., Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press,

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1996), 196-200; and Stephen Daniels, Joseph Wright (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 61-77. 39 Stafford, Voyage, 321: “The British writers Gerard and Duff specifically commented that a genius for science is formed by honing one’s powers of sagacious penetration whereas a genius for the arts depends on the cultivation of a shallow ‘brightness.’ By this epistemological opposition they established a tension between searching knowledge and surface brilliance.” See Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London: W. Strahan, 1774): 322-23, and William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius; and Its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1767) 2nd Edition: 35. 40 Fraser, “Fields of Radiance,” 126. 41 Whitehurst, 163. I doubt it is a coincidence that this statement alludes to the business of Josiah Wedgwood, member of the DPS, friend and frequent guest of the Lunar Society. 42 This is a point Fraser does not make; thus not giving the artist the intellectual benefit of the doubt. Whitehurst’s discussion of toadstone may be found on pages 149-50, and 158-163. 43 Whitehurst himself makes a comparison of Derbyshire and Staffordshire with southern Italy in relation to their mutual volcanic landscapes: “The mountains in Derbyshire, and the moorlands of Staffordshire appear to be so many heaps of ruins…; for, in the neighborhood of Ecton, Wetton, Dovedale, Ilam, and Swithamly, the strata lie in the utmost confusion and disorder. They are broken, dislocated, and thrown into every possible direction, and their interior parts [i.e., caverns] are no less rude and romantic…. We may add, to the above observations, that extraordinary phenomenon of large blocks of stone being scattered over the surface of mountainous countries, and blended with their soils to very considerable depths, as if they had been originally ejected from their native beds by subterraneous blasts, as stones from Vesuvius and Ætna.” (51-52) He also compares the Midlands landscape with Iceland (celebrated for volcanic and seismic activity) and Norway. 44 Stafford, Voyage, 47. 45 Egerton, Wright of Derby, 184. 46 Fraser, “Fields of Radiance,” 126. 47 William Hooson, The Miner’s Dictionary: Explaining Not Only the Terms Used by Miners, But Also Containing Theory and Practice of that Most Useful Art of Mineing, More Especially of Lead-Mines (Wrexham: William Hooson and T. Payne, 1742. Facsimile reprint, Yorkshire: Scholar Press, 1979). “That I do not at all pretend to see into the Bowels and Concaves of the Earth, any more than a Physician can see into the Body of Man; but it is proper and apparent Signs and Symptoms at the Day, that indicates to us Miners the Nature of Places, whether they may contain Metalline Veins or not; and this has been the way practiced by the Antient and wisest Miners, who doubtless has been the most knowing and Skilful in that part of Mineing, having acquired it by long Practice and Experience.” (Introduction to Appendix. No page numbers.) W. Sharpe writes

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similarly about topographical clues to the location of coal fields in A Treatise upon Coal-Mines: Or, An Attempt to Explain Their General Marks of Indication, Acknowledg’d and Probable (London: F. Newberry, 1769). 48 Melissa Percival, “Johann Caspar Lavater: Physiognomy and Connoisseurship,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (March 2003): 77-90. 49 Ford, 365. Samples of volcanic rock from the area around Vesuvius were surely made available to fellows of the Royal Society by Sir William Hamilton, who periodically published his observations of that volcano’s behavior in the Philosophical Transactions. Fragments of volcanic matter were, in any event, illustrated in the color aquatints of Peter Fabris that were published in Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (1776). 50 Pilkington, 256ff. In his discussion of the reasons for the existence of warm springs in these areas of Derbyshire, Darwin argues in accordance with Whitehurst’s theory that a subterraneous fire, and not the decomposition of pyrites, was the primary cause, writing: “This fire heats the source of the water to a boiling point and as the water flows through the lower layers of the Earth [which he says are at a constant temperature of 48 degrees] it flows out at the exit point at a temperature between 48 and 212—the warmth being directly proportional to the distance travelled.” (Ibid., 257) He later states that these geological processes are “so well explain’d in Mr. Whitehurst’s, and in Mr. Hutton’s theories of the earth,” thus noting their similarity in his mind. (Ibid., 259) 51 Peter Lord, The Visual Culture of Wales: Imaging the Nation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), chapters 4 and 5, pp. 98-166, and David Solkin, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1983), 11-22, 56-112. For depictions of Pre-Roman Britain in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century British art see Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 52 Pilkington, 205-224. 53 Ibid., 225. 54 Flindall and Hayes, 17. 55 Pilkington, 62-63. Emphasis added. 56 Ibid., 63. 57 Ellis Hillman, ed. British Artists in Rome, 1700-1800 (London: Greater London Council, 1974): catalogue entry, “de Loutherbourg.” See also Rüdiger Joppien, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, RA (Kenwood, 1973) and idem. Die Szenenbilder Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourgs: Eine Untersuchung zu ihrer Stellung zwischen Malerei und Theater, doctoral dissertation (Cologne: Universität zu Köln, 1972). Joppien’s dissertation is in the collection of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 58 Born Giuseppe Balsamo in Palermo in 1743, the self-styled Count Cagliostro involved himself in such secretive and mystical pursuits as freemasonry, faithhealing, and alchemy. Throughout the course of his life he became a fugitive from the law in almost every European capital (including London), and was finally arrested in Rome by order of Pope Pius VI, where he was imprisoned in the Castel

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Sant’Angelo and sentenced to death. He died in prison after a fit of apoplexy in 1795. See The Life of Joseph Balsamo, Commonly Called Count Cagliostro (Dublin: P. Byrne, et al., 1792), translated from the original Italian; Lucia [pseudonym], The Life of the Count Cagliostro… Dedicated to Madame La Comtesse de Cagliostro (London: Printed for the author, 1787); and Raymond Silva, Joseph Balsamo, alias Cagliostro (Quebec: Éditions Québec-Amérique, 1976). 59 Daniels, “Joseph Wright and the Spectacle of Power,” 43-79. 60 For a further discussion of Wright’s work in relation to Wedgwood’s business see Ann Bermingham, “Wright of Derby’s Corinthian Maid,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture, ed. John Barrell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 135-165, passim. See also Frank Cossa, “Wedgwood as Patron of Flaxman, Stubbs, and Wright of Derby,” Ph.D. dissertation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University). 61 Daniels, Joseph Wright (Princeton: Princeton University Press and the Tate Gallery, 1999), ch.4 passim. 62 William Bemrose, Life and Works. Extra-illustrated, author’s copy in the collection of the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, c. 1888. Handwritten letter, inserted. 63 Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby, 75. See also Egerton, Wright of Derby, 176177. 64 Sloan, Alexander and John Robert Cozens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986): 99. 65 Sloan, Alexander and John, 100, fig. 118: John Robert Cozens, Matlock (1772). No definite connection between Wright and either of the Cozenses has been established, except that he is known to have owned drawings and made copies after works by Alexander. 66 Such textural paint application is seen also in Wright’s Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent (c. 1773), on the blasted tree in the central foreground and the cliff-face on the right, the lantern light playing on the crags of the bark and the rock. The thick application of paint and glazes in these areas contrasts sharply with the smoothness of the left half of the picture, where the view opens up to a moonlit, silvery, clouded sky. 67 See note 43. 68 “Memoirs of Thomas Jones,” Walpole Society (vol. 32, 1946-1948), 60-61. 69 Writing to his friend Daniel Daulby, Jr. of Liverpool, on February 7, 1786, Wright states: “I am persuaded by my friend [Gisborne] to take the fashionable Tour of the Lakes next autumn and I sounded my dear friend Tate upon the scheme but have not heard from him since. if we go your Company will be a happy addition. but I wou’d have the party small and none ingage [sic.] in it but drafsmen [sic.], for reasons too obvious to need mentioning—” (Derby Local Studies Library, Joseph Wright Letters. See also Barker, 119, letter 69.) But, Wright postponed his journey to the Lakes for several years because of prior commitments and poor health. When he had finally seen the place in about 1793

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he lamented not having gone as a much younger man when his hands were steadier and he more energetic. 70 Stafford refers to such a juxtaposition as “paratactic” in Voyage into Substance: “Parataxis and a ‘simple’ style are employed when one is overwhelmingly interested in being understood by a large and broad-based audience. To this end, its utilitarian power depends on bringing forward juxtaposed, isolated, and independent pictorial or verbal blocks, thus producing the effects of nearness and brevity. Such controlled compression acts as a foil to the immense content. The ‘naked’ statement… achieves intense presence and immediacy. The paratactic composition, based on the ideal of linguistic or representational transparency and primitive terseness, is the preferred mode for itemizing the findings of the natural sciences. Similarly, it answers the need for achieving an impression of directness and clarity in the description or ‘demonstration’ of landscape features expected from the factual travel narrative” (pp. 48-49). 71 Nicolson, Joseph Wright, 87: “Nothing of the kind is found in the landscapes of the mid-’80’s where all scenery, however rugged, is tidied up and smoothed out.” 72 The philosophical split may also be related, significantly, to the schism between Speculative (‘Modern’ Freemasons) and Operative (‘Antient’ Free and Accepted Masons) Freemasonry in the eighteenth century—the former embracing sublime, mystical ceremony, while the latter sought to eliminate what they saw as obscurantist frills from their fraternity because they smacked of both Rosicrucianism and Roman Catholicism. For information on the development of Freemasonry in Europe, see: R. William Weisberger, Speculative Freemasonry and the Enlightenment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993): 24; Roy A. Wells, The Rise and Development of Organised Freemasonry (London: Lewis Masonic, 1986); and Idem., Understanding Freemasonry (London: Lewis Masonic, 1991): 7-8. 73 William Efford, “A Description of the Famous Copper-Mine, Belonging to His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, at Ecton-Hill, in the County of Stafford,” Gentleman’s Magazine (February 1769). My emphasis. 74 Peter Lord, The Visual Culture of Wales: Imaging the Nation (Cardiff, 2000), 98-166; and David Solkin, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction (London, 1983), 11-22, 56-112. For depictions of Pre-Roman Britain in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century British art, see Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994). 75 Sloan, Alexander and John, 49-62. Sloan argues that Alexander Cozens’ The Various Species of Landscape, &c. in Nature (early 1770s, not known to have been published) was the artist’s attempt to instruct his students and others to paint moral landscapes by identifying sixteen composition types and twenty-seven ‘circumstances’ with specific emotions and associations. Part of Cozens’ unpublished manuscript is in the collection of the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. 76 As Porter remarks, “Certain writers, notably George Hoggart Toulmin and James Hutton, discarded written human testimony as valueless for Earth history….

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[P]resent in the thought of [Benôit] de Maillet, le Cat, Whitehurst, [Oliver] Goldsmith, Hutton, and Toulmin was the perception of the independent, and assured, continued existence of the Earth with its own laws, free from theological interference and destruction: here to stay” (Making of Geology, 107-8). Whitehurst was ambivalent about the relationship of his theories to scriptural authority: “Though he argued that his theory harmonized with Genesis, he offered almost no analysis of Scripture (or of pagan philosophy)…. Indeed, in some ways his theory flew in the face of Genesis, in asserting, for instance, that life was thriving in the oceans before the separation of land and sea…. Whitehurst was also a child of his time in explaining the Deluge… by internal heat powers. The Deluge was deluge secondarily; its primary cause was a universal earthquake-cum-volcano, demonstrating Whitehurst’s Enlightenment emphasis upon an active Earth” (Making of Geology, 125-26).

CHAPTER TWO SOURCES OF WEALTH: WRIGHT’S SOCIAL STATUS AND HIS PORTRAITS OF INDUSTRIAL POWER

In the previous chapter I discussed Wright’s Derbyshire landscapes within the contexts of geology, mining and antiquity. To that end I examined the economic functions of geology and lead mining in the East Midlands. In this chapter I shall explore the concept of land as wealth in relation to four of Wright’s portraits of local industrialists and landowners: Francis Hurt, Charles Hurt, Susannah Hurt (née Arkwright), and Sir Richard Arkwright. I begin by showing how the artist had property ownership and affluence in common with these patrons, arguing that such independent means afforded Wright the luxury of not having to paint for money [Plate 2-1]. Next I discuss the way land is represented in these portraits either as a symbolic reference to inherited wealth or as a real, functioning source of industrial income. Both inherited and industrial wealth contributed to the national prosperity of Britain, either directly (and immediately) in terms of international trade, or indirectly in the broader sense of ‘improvement.’ In the course of my discussion I shed new light on these portraits and their functions at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It is often assumed that Wright chose to stay in Derby for much of his career simply because he was neither sufficiently talented, nor socially savvy, prerequisites to establishing a fashionable portrait practice in London or Bath.1 Instead, as the story goes, he found his niche among the nouveaux riches and country squires of the Midlands, an emerging elite, who wanted to patronize a local painter and who may not have had the aesthetic sensibility to know or to want any better. This is an erroneous oversimplification of a much more complicated situation. Indeed, Wright hit a few stumbling blocks in London; however, for the most part, his work was well regarded.2 In spite of critical approbation, he was nevertheless snubbed by the Royal Academy of Arts, which elected Edmund Garvey as Royal Academician in his stead. He was further

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alienated when full membership was offered to him as a reluctant afterthought, the painter refusing the honor in an admirable effort to preserve his own dignity. Anthony Pasquin (a.k.a. John Williams) defended the artist’s honor in a satirical report of the incident, “The Royal Academicians: A Farce, 1786,” which is a scathing admonishment of the institution’s decision and ends, in fanciful humor, with Wright kicking the academy’s secretary in a gesture of scornful contempt.3 Wright also felt slighted when John Boydell rejected his painting Romeo and Juliet for the Shakespeare Gallery. The London publisher had already insulted the painter by paying him less for his other contributions than Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West, despite the facts that the former’s picture was far smaller and the latter’s was of equal size. As is made clear in Wright’s correspondence,4 however, the issue was not the money itself, but the painter’s professional reputation and the respect he demanded from his patrons, both of which were attached to the value of his artistic productions.5 Moreover, his noncommissioned paintings did not always sell and several pictures were still in his studio when he lay dying in 1797—including A Philosopher by Lamplight, The Alchymist, Hermit Studying Anatomy, The Captive King (lost), The Old Man and Death (Wadsworth Athenaeum version), Margaret and William, Romeo and Juliet, Maria (companion to Edwin), The Dead Soldier, The Indian Widow, two pictures of the Colosseum, and Vesuvius in Eruption (intended for Lord Hervey but withheld by the artist). The fact that Wright rarely complained about his personal finances, despite the facts that many of his paintings went unsold and he was excluded from the artistic establishment in London, begs the question, never asked before, of whether Wright painted for a living. Did he need to sell his work? There is considerable evidence to suggest that he did not need to paint for money after the late 1760s. After dining with Wright’s close friends— John Leigh Philips of Manchester, his brother Frank Philips, and the Tate family of Liverpool—Joseph Farington wrote in his diary that the artist inherited £100 per annum from his father, who had died in 1767.6 As early as October 1773 he was financially secure enough to travel to Italy. Artists and architects who made the Grand Tour often accompanied wealthy patrons who footed the bill, sometimes employed as a tutor or chaperone for a young gentleman of means. But, as far as we know, Wright not only financed his own journey, but also was able to bring with him his pregnant wife and an apprentice named Richard Hurleston. The painter had recently eloped with his bride and their trip to Italy helped avoid scandal while honeymooning. It is, however, perhaps true that Wright’s brief and unsuccessful stint as a portrait painter in Bath upon his return from Italy

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was an attempt to make some quick money to offset the unexpectedly high costs of travel and fatherhood. But, despite the difficulties in Bath, his finances quickly improved. Wright’s correspondence indicates that money was usually not a major concern. In a letter to Daniel Daulby, a fellow artist in Liverpool, regarding Daulby’s purchase of a Girandola picture, Wright not only discloses the sizeable discount he gave the buyer, but also tells Daulby not to rush with the payment—any time during the following year would suffice.7 Later, writing to his friend John Leigh Philips of Manchester, Wright says he will deduct ten guineas from the price of a copy of Indian Widow for Mr. McNevin of Liverpool (possibly an attorney) in exchange for “his assistance to lay out my property to advantage,” which I think means prepare his will. In the next sentence, the painter asks Philips his opinion of the stock market as he is considering selling “a little property … I bought in about [17]76.”8 Wright also mentions his own servants and a gardener in at least two subsequent letters to Philips.9 By 1789, Wright was held in such high social regard that Josiah Wedgwood’s memorandum concerning a gift to the artist of a set of green shell table service refers to the recipient as “Joseph Wright Esqr.”10 Moreover, the artist’s account book contains other evidence to support the claim that the artist did not need to paint for money.11 The ledger is not merely a list of paintings, buyers, and prices as Nicolson might have us believe; it is an almost complete record of all Wright’s major financial transactions—credits and debits—from c. 1760 to 1797. For example, it lists an undated account for Jacky Van, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Van, who were either family friends or tenants who rented property from Wright. The date of the account is unknown, but it likely dates after the artist’s return from Italy when he resumed control of the book because the entry is in his own hand and the cause seems to be made plain in a letter he wrote to his sister from Rome in 1774: What havock my dear Nancy does a little time make in the small circle of one’s acquaintances and how weak and dottering is the Basis on which Human happiness is founded. Poor Mrs. Van! I left her a happy wife, smiling amidst a joyous family, but now by one fatal stroke suddenly involved in a bitter Calamity in deep affliction—a sad disconsolable Widow. I hope to God Mr. Van has left her so circumstanced that she will feel no additional sorrow on that consideration. He was a good man and has no doubt done what he could for his dear family.—When you see them, or write to them, give my love to them, & say I let fall many a 12 sympathetic Tear.

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Wright apparently paid for the widow’s son’s travel to school at Quarn (in Leicestershire), his visit to Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the portage of his shoes and clothes, a new pair of shoes, transport for Mrs. Van (to Quarn), new clothes, a hair cut, and tuition for a year of school and board (paid to Mr. Cade). The total cost of such philanthropy was £27.7s.8d.13 Admittedly, Wright’s record keeping is not a model of financial organization, especially illustrated by a comparison with the meticulous section maintained for him by his brother Richard, a surgeon, while the artist was in Italy.14 In spite of this observation, the records clearly show Wright had regular income from enclosed property he owned and let to tenants.15 That the land was in fact his is made clear in a letter from Rome, dated 11 November 1774: “I am glad my tenants like their closes. I hope their pains and Expenses will be unwasted.”16 By comparing the rates of rent with those published in Arthur Young’s Farmer’s Tour Through the East of England (1771), it is reasonable to assume that these closes were sizeable areas of wasteland, enclosed by the landlord and improved for cultivation of either crops or livestock at the tenants’ expense, which was the common practice.17 Additionally, the painter frequently recorded the dispersal of large sums of money as loans to various people: £1,000 to Sir William Meredith; £500 to Mrs. Robinson; £200 to Mr. Dawson; £800 to Mr. Wallis; £200 to William Painter; £200 to Mr. Bakewell; £250 to William Strutt; £200 to Mr. Miller; £100 to Richard Wright (his brother); and £129.3s to Brooke Boothby in the form of a bond for the payment of several paintings.18 In at least one instance, Wright even made a mortgage loan.19 The majority of these loans were never repaid in full during the artist’s lifetime; however, the payment of interest and installments provided Wright with a steady income for the rest of his life. Shortly before his death, he reportedly was worth £25,000 according to Farington.20 Painting was clearly not the only source of his wealth; land ownership and money lending brought in a sizeable, regular income that painting could not, affording the artist a level of financial prosperity more in keeping with his social status than if he had chosen to be only a society painter in London, or, heaven forbid, in Bath. Like many in his circle, he was a ‘private gentleman’ according to the definition set down later by his friend the Reverend Thomas Gisborne: Private gentlemen may be considered under the following characters: first, as land-owners; secondly, as invested with various offices and trusts of a public nature; and thirdly, as bound to the performance of numerous private and domestic duties…. These duties result partly from the actual

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power which the landlord enjoys over his estates, and the tenants who occupy them….21

Although in hindsight it is clear that the enclosure of the common land did disenfranchise the poor who depended on its communal fields, it was believed by many progressives at the time to be a positive agricultural improvement—Physiocratic theory in action. The landlord, and Wright was a perfect example, often funded the construction of the outer wall of a close, renting sections of it to tenants. Subdividing walls were erected at the tenants’ expense and it became their job to ready the land for pasture or cultivation. It was in their interest to be diligent in these tasks because their production revenue had to cover their initial investment and rental fees.22 Speaking to the landlords, Young argued that high rents, as opposed to free access to common land, discouraged indolence and vice among the poor. Wright’s friend Gisborne echoed Young’s sentiment in 1794, explaining a reasonable rent is in the interest of both tenant and landlord: Where the rent is too low, the owner loses a portion of what he might reasonably demand; the farmer becomes indolent; no improvements are pushed forward; for want of exertion to make things better, every thing grows worse; the buildings fall into decay; and the ground continually relapses towards a state of nature.23

From our perspective it is easy to see how this developed into the Victorian ethos, but these men—Young, Gisborne, Wright, and many others—could not have realized what the nineteenth century would bring. They did, however, know that they were modernizing agricultural practice. The feudal system of tithes and other manorial payments was to be replaced, wherever possible, by a less arbitrary system of rents in accordance with the economic relationship between acreage and production. Farming was industrialized for the theoretical good of all involved. Adam Smith translated the mutual benefit of landlord and tenant into economic terms of national prosperity: Higher rents added the incentive to increase production on the part of the tenant. Increased productivity lowered the cost of the product for the consumer. Demand increased in light of lower prices and any surplus goods were exported to less agriculturally productive countries. Profits rose accordingly and made the value of the enclosure greater and the rent, therefore, higher, since the landlord desired his share.24 Gisborne later listed the rental of enclosed property to tenant farmers among the duties of the ‘private gentleman’ for the good of the nation, citing Smith’s economic rationale.25 Being a longtime friend of Gisborne’s and an acquaintance of many would-be members

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of the Derby Philosophical Society, Wright was certainly aware of his role as gentleman landlord and the responsibilities attached to it on both a local and a national plane.26 Even as an artist, Wright used his social connections for the improvement of the local community. Jacky Van was a case in point. And, while not much is known about Richard Hurleston, another of Wright’s apprentices, Nathaniel Claydon, appears to have been a destitute orphan. Although he seems to have lacked the talent for painting, Claydon’s mastery of drawing prompted Wright to recommend him to Josiah Wedgwood for work at the Etruria pottery factory.27 But the young man was also a bit of a troublemaker. Wright’s compassion, benevolent philanthropy, and patience show plainly in his letters to Wedgwood about the boy and are a testament to his gentlemanliness. You will wonder I have not of all this time, taken some notice of the youth I recommended to you & solicited you to take into your manufactory, and of whose abilities I spoke in good terms, in wch. I am not deceived. Wou’d I cou’d say as much of his conduct. After I had taken infinite pains to instruct him in drawing from plaister, & had brought him very forwards, and collected among my friends a little money to discharge a few debts he had necessarily contracted since he was out of his time, in short when I had prepared him for you, he left me for 6 weeks without taking ye least notice where he was going, and on his return, he took care to tell a person, who he knew wou’d communicate it to me, that he shou’d not on any account go to Mr. Wedgwood’s, he was better employed. As he came not nigh me, I informed him by a note of the impropriety of his conduct; he wrote me the most insolent answer his fertile brain could suggest, lost sight of all obligations, & subscribed himself simply Nat. Claydon. I cou’d not have supposed it possible for any man to have given me such unmerited abuse nor the conduct of such a person have so hurt me, but ingratitude come from whence it will, wounds deeply….28 I am going to trouble you again on the business of my ungrateful pupil, if I err, ‘tis on the side of mercy & I know you will forgive me. Since I wrote to you I have rec’d a long & penitential Letter from him, acknowledging his faults & imploring pardon. I will inclose his Letter, that you may see he stands self-accused, & that I wrote not from ill grounded picque or resentment. You will also see by my Letter to him wch. is under written, how far I am inclined to forgive him, & if you think I act right, it will I hope meet wth. your concurrence. I have taken some pains to learn if he is truly sorry for his conduct to me & if his reformation may be depended upon. I am told he has had no peace since he sent me that letter, wch. he neither wrote nor dictated & that his health is much declined wth. uneasiness. When you have read the letters you’ll pray indulge me wth. a

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line, that he may know your determination. I am wth. much esteem Dr. Sr. yours J: Wright. [Wright’s transcription of his letter to Claydon:] St. Ellens [St. Helens— Wright’s home in Derby] 30th Jan.. 1789 Nat. Claydon, Nothing but that humanity wch. first inclined me to take notice of a friendless Orphan cou’d now induce me after such unmerit’d abuse, to stretch forth my hand again to save you. I shall not here wound you wth. a retrospect of your past conduct to me. You seem to have set it in a right point of view, and see all its deformities. Had your behaviour been such, as my disinterested services to you deserved, I might still have continued that fostering friendship I once shew’d you, and wch. either gratitude or selfinterest shou’d have taught you to have cultivated, in spite of all malicious instigations. However as things are, I will so far be your friend again, as to endeavour to put you into that Situation I first intended, in wch. if you act your part well, you may prosper & be happy. Jos.h Wright. PS—Whether I shall succeed in a second application to Mr. Wedgwood is a matter of doubt, as it became necessary to assign the reason you did not wait upon him at the appointed time & wch. I did a few posts ago.29

These letters reveal Wright’s attempt to find gainful employment for a disadvantaged youth, an activity very much on the minds of the local elite as part of a nebulous plan of societal ‘improvement.’ Reverend Thomas Gisborne, the artist’s friend, patron and sketching partner, put it in agricultural terms, which may also be easily applied to mining and industry: To encourage a race of honest, skilful, and industrious tenants, is one of the first duties of a private gentleman; whether he consults his own interest, or the general welfare of the community…. [This may be achieved] by furnishing all its inhabitants with constant and growing employment, and thus preventing the vices and disorders which derive their origin from idleness.30

The enclosure of common lands in Britain not only disenfranchised the agrarian poor by securing agriculturally productive property for private landlords, but it also affected the mining industries by limiting access to subterranean metallic and mineral veins, often to the advantage of Wright’s patrons.31 Prior to enclosure, free-miners or ‘adventurers’ could dig freely for various ores, coal and minerals on common land. When a vein was located, the miner marked the spot on the surface with an ‘X’ (chiseled into a cap stone or made of two sticks) identifying it as belonging

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to him. The Barmote Court (sometimes Barmoot)—the presiding judge of which is called the Barmaster—enforced (and continues to enforce regularly to this day) the procedures, laws and customs involved. Property lines established by enclosure shut the free-miners out of vast sections of potentially valuable veins. As the practice increased during the eighteenth century, the problem grew worse. But the life of a free-miner was unpredictable and dangerous, and as industry in Derbyshire advanced many outcast miners found regular, gainful employment for themselves, their wives and children in the factories. Sir Richard Arkwright, for example, had a ready workforce at his disposal, and the year-round employment of displaced miners and their families was understood to be part of the overall improvement of the area.32 These jobs often offered a steady, if meager, income as well as a place to live. By 1789, Jedediah Strutt’s mill at Belper counted 433 factory houses with new ones being built every month.33 However, mining did not cease. The limitations brought by enclosure actually led to a modernization of the mining system, too, which paralleled the advances in agriculture. Consolidated mining empires replaced the piecemeal “adventure” system. Mining corporations were formed, selling shares to investors to provide the financial backing for their speculations.34 These corporations employed former free-miners to work the mines, paying them a salary derived from profits. But the extent of the companies’ fiscal responsibility did not stop with the shareholders and employees. When following a vein beneath common ground, a duty of lot was paid to the Crown’s representative lord of the land. In Derbyshire, this was the duke of Devonshire, Lessee of the King’s Field. The duty was assessed according to the amount of ore brought to the surface. When a vein continued beneath enclosed, private property, however, arrangements had to be made between the company and the landlord. These ‘indentures’ or contractual leases of underground property often provided for damage to the surface level and for monetary compensation over the course of many years (99 years was a not uncommon figure). Either the Barmote Court or the Assize Court of the High Sheriff enforced these contracts. Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Black Lead Mine in Cumberland [Fig. 2-1] is useful for illustrating the process of eighteenth-century leadmining. In the right middle ground a woman and child near a small thatched shelter clean and separate the lead ore. A similar hut is seen in Wright’s paintings of Matlock Tor (by daylight, mid 1780s; by moonlight, 1777-80) on the east bank of the Derwent with a pile of rocky, miningrelated debris in front of it. Plate II of John Whitehurst’s An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth [Fig. 1-1] shows two

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vertical lead-mine shafts through the Tor itself—Side Mine and High-Tor Rake—that were in use at the time. The ore was divided into categorical groups using a series of sifts; isolating first the small pebbles, then the larger chunks called ‘smitham,’ and finally the largest pieces designated ‘bing’ and/or ‘peasy.’ Each group was measured separately in the troughlike container in the foreground of de Loutherbourg’s image, a tool known as a ‘dish.’35 The duke of Devonshire received one out of every thirteen dishes of bing and peasy ore, as the custom was dictated and enforced by the Barmote Court, until 1765.

Fig. 2-1. M.C. Prestel after Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, A Black Lead Mine in Cumberland (1787). Aquatint. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library, London.

In that year, the Duke filed suit against the lead miners of the Cromford Gang Partners to claim his full rights to 1/13th of all ore— smitham, bing, and peasy—though he offered to compromise and accept 1/25th. Either scenario would have given His Grace much more of a share than he previously received. The suit dragged on in the courts and subsequently in Parliament until about 1772.36 The Duke alleged he was

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being defrauded by the mining corporation, who he claimed were breaking the large bing and peasy ore into small bits of smitham with their picks and hammers in order to avoid paying duties. The rationale behind such deception would have been rooted in the custom that smitham was exempt from the ducal tax, although it was the Duke’s right to collect such a duty on it if he so chose.37 The mining company was outraged (or at least feigned outrage). Anthony Tissington, a gentleman mine-owner from Derbyshire and friend of John Whitehurst, Erasmus Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin, explained the story in a series of letters to the editor of the Derby Mercury.38 In 1766, at a general Meeting of the Miners, it was agreed to defend against the Demand, and reject the Compromise; and in March Mr. [Francis] Hurt, the late Mr. Bloodworth, Mr. George Evans, myself, and late Brother Geo. Tissington, were chose as Trustees for the Public, to defend the Customs in the Names of who ever shou’d be attack’d, and we form’d ourselves into a Committee for that Purpose. The Attack was made on the Cromford Soughers, commonly called the Gang Partners, by a Bill in Chancery, at the Suit of the Lessee of the Crown; the Committee for the Public enter’d into the Defence in Chancery, and also instituted a Suit in the Duchy, in the Names of the Gang Partners, against the said Lessee, which Suits have been carried on under the Direction of the said Committee, until the latter Part of March 1772. In October 1771, a Meeting was had of the said Committee, when it was unanimously agreed to take out a Commission in the Cause in the Duchy, and adjourned to the 20th of November then next, when all the Accounts were ordered to be brought in. On the 20th November last the said Committee met again, inspected the Accounts, gave the necessary Orders relating there to, ordered a Commission to be taken out, approved of the Commissioners then named, and Mr. Hurt and Mr. Evans, who were the Treasurers, promis’d to provide Cash for the said Commission and the necessary Resolutions for that Purpose were then unanimously enter’d into. In Pursuance of these Orders, a Commission was taken out, returnable the 6th of May now last past; and in March Notice was given for the Execution of it at Matlock New Bath, when the Treasurers were apply’d to for Money to carry it on, which they refus’d, and to sanctify the Refusal, a private Meeting was had at Wirksworth on the 28th of March to approve what was done. Here it was expected the Cause must end; the Consequence of which must have been, the yielding up the Customs, and the subjecting of the Gang Partners to Costs and Suit; to prevent both I advanced Money for carrying on the Commission, and so sav’d the Gang Partners and the Country from an Event so disagreeable to one and ruinous to the other;39

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Tissington’s letter names Francis Hurt (c.1722-83) as one of the treasurers of the Committee for the Public acting on behalf of the miners against the “tyranny” of the nobility. Although Tissington, influenced perhaps by Franklin, phrased it in such political terms, it was certainly in the committee members’ financial interest to act in such a manner. If the payment of lot were lessened or eliminated, more profits could be reaped while productivity remained constant. Hurt was seventh in the line of succession to his family’s seat of Alderwasley. A series of fortuitous marriages linked the Hurts of Casterne inseparably to two other old families with ties to lead mining and mineral rights—the Lowes of Alderwasley and, later, the Gells of Hopton Hall and of the Gatehouse, Wirksworth.40 By the eighteenth century the most powerful heads of gentry families had distanced themselves from direct participation in commercial mining; but Hurt, never expecting to inherit his family’s fortune, owned mines and smelting facilities in and around Derbyshire. He became a self-made man and, therefore, had more in common with other local industrialists like Arkwright and Jedediah Strutt than with other landed gentry and minor aristocrats. Eventually, however, after the unexpected deaths of six elder brothers, Hurt inherited the family seat—Alderwasley Hall. Already a magnate in the lead industry, he continued to play an active role in the sometimes ruthless business. One year before his death, Hurt sat to Wright for a portrait [Fig. 2-2]. The painter’s famously uncompromising realism—of a similar egalitarian ilk as Roman Republican portrait sculpture—depicts the lead mogul not as the heir to Alderwasley, but as a prosperous man of industry near the end of his career. No attempt is made to mask his corpulence or to idealize the face. He sits proudly and monumentally, exuding a regal presence not unlike the earl of Macclesfield in his portrait by Thomas Hudson.41 On the table next to Hurt are two objects—a rock and an open document, possibly a letter or a contract, with a red wax seal. The rock is not iron ore, as Nicolson mistakenly believed, but a specific type of lead ore known as galena (PbS—lead sulphide), which weathers to a dull black on the outside while maintaining a silvery luster inside. It breaks in regular cubic or octahedral forms. Wright’s accurate depiction of the galena is an eloquent signifier of Hurt’s source of self-made wealth. Although scholars have pointed out the presence of galena in the portrait, they have strangely ignored the piece of paper, failing to mention it at all. The fictive writing on the painted document is, unfortunately, illegible. However, the careful rendering of its texture and translucency, and its equal placement among the galena as an attribute of the sitter, suggest that it is not a generic, decoratively placed letter, but represents a

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specific document of historical importance. At the very least it may be considered a depiction of an article of indenture granting Hurt and his partners access to lead veins beneath private lands. But since portraits often commemorate an important event in the life of a sitter, the year in which he sat to Wright offers other, more specific possibilities.

Fig. 2-2. Joseph Wright, Francis Hurt, Esq. (1782). Private collection.

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In about 1775 Hurt and his associates in the Crich Sough Partners realized that a productive vein their workers had been following extended underneath an area of enclosed manorial property in Crich.42 The Trustees of the Earl of Shrewsbury Hospital (in Sheffield) owned the land as part of the endowment left them in the Earl’s will of 1616. Shrewsbury gave the land to the Sheffield hospital presumably because he knew of its mineral wealth. Indeed, according to the case filed against the Crich Soughers on behalf of the Trustees, there were mines within the borders of the hospital lands, but it is unclear whether they were in use in 1775.43 To avoid having to arrange an indenture with the Trustees for entrance to the hospital’s mines, Hurt’s company decided to dig a shaft just outside the border fence and tunnel beneath the entrusted land. Over the course of his life and career Hurt had gained a monopoly on mineral rights in the Liberty of Crich that extended below and beyond all surface delineations of private property. So long as his miners did not disturb or damage private land on the surface, he did not need permission to tunnel beneath. More importantly, he did not owe the property owner any share of the mineral yields. By tunneling under the hospital lands from an outside point, Hurt’s company did not incur damage liabilities in the process of harvesting what Hurt believed was already his. The Trustees of the Hospital saw things differently and demanded Hurt produce proof of his carte blanche mineral rights. A manuscript draft of their case, perhaps part of a closing argument, dated 1782, survives in the collection of the British Library. The late date obviously indicates that the dispute dragged on for several years. Wherein some Gentlemen and others think they have discover’d that to such paymts. for lead ore got in the Hospital Lands in Crich the Hospital hath no right. But that the right of Mining thro the Ldship of Crich and all the Lands there belongeth to them and that all dutys for Lead Ore in that Lordship belonged to them, And these Gentm. have of late Years began and carried on a Sough to unwater divers Mines in Crych which has Cost some 1000£ and therefore they are the more sanguine to obtain all the benefit of the Mines in Crych, this Sough is drove, as it is thought into the Hospital Lands and a Shaft is sunk upon or close upon the boundary fence which the Sough Masters have placed a door upon, and locked it up and being requested to let a Man down it on the part of the Hospital Govrs: to examine the works below in order to discover whether any entry or trespasses below had been made into the Hospital Lands to the wrong or injury of these Lands they refused so to do….44

Moreover, according to the hospital’s solicitor Hurt’s mineral officer, John Eaton, agreed at first with the Trustees that the ‘Lords’ had no right

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to the ore or duties in the hospital lands, despite the fact that they had such rights throughout the rest of Crich. But Eaton later changed his mind, choosing “to be on the Strongest Side and would Stick to the Lords.”45 In a letter to the solicitor for the hospital, Hurt enclosed a copy of one of “several Conveyances for Shares of Lott and Cope within Critch Manner [sic.] made by [Mr.] Bennet and [Mr.] Smith,” who had acquired such rights, as stipulated, from Henry Howard “years before the Lands at Crich was settled on the Hospital at Sheffield.”46 The deed was signed over from Howard to Bennet and Smith on January 14, 1669. The descendants of Bennet and Smith sold and conveyed the rights to Hurt. The hospital insisted that a deed of 1669 could not undo the Earl’s will of 1616, while the ‘Lords’ argued that Howard must have had the rights long before the endowment of the Earl’s land. The fact that the date of the Portrait of Francis Hurt coincides with the date of the aforementioned case brief—1782—may indicate that a decision was reached in that year in favor of the Crich Partners. If such a verdict were reached, it would have been a decisive victory for Hurt and his heirs, solidifying their claim to all mineral rights in perpetuity within the Liberty of Crich. The document on the table may, therefore, be a letter from his attorney informing him of the decision. It may also be the deed of conveyance that proved his case. Unfortunately, I have found no other documents in the British Library that reveal the verdict. A notebook kept by Hurt, however, exists among the Hurt Family Papers in the collection of the Derbyshire Record Office in Matlock. Its entries are numbered and dated. It is essentially a journal, written in list format, of veins belonging to the Crich Sough Partners. One entry is particularly telling in the context of Wright’s portrait of Hurt: 20[th] D[itt]o: [April 1, 1782] A Scrin Crossing the undertown Vein from the founder Westwardly to the Hospitall Land—4 Mear [1 meer = 28 yards] & Eastwardly 3 Mears of Ground—Which to the 1st Day of April 1782 is all in good and Lawful possession.47

The last line of the above listing means one of two things: Either the Crich Sough Partners purchased the land in question from the Sheffield Hospital to remove all doubt about their claim to the mineral rights, or a legal verdict was passed in favor of the company. In any event, Hurt’s mining corporation was, as of April 1, 1782, free to claim the mineral rights throughout the entire Liberty of Crich. Wright’s Portrait of Francis Hurt was quite plausibly commissioned to commemorate the sitter’s last—and greatest—triumph. It was also, in a larger sense, a victory for laissez-faire business practices in the lead-mining industry, which had been struggling

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to shake off the tyranny of arbitrary duties and tithes since the 1760s. Wright surely knew of this struggle through Whitehurst, Darwin, and the Derby Mercury, and Hurt, as Treasurer of the Committee for the Public, was a key player. The unidealized portrait, read in this context, celebrates unrestricted mercantilism and unfettered economic ambition. In his will Hurt, perhaps sensitive to the unfairness of primogeniture, made almost equal bequests to his two sons.48 The will divided his estate by inherited and self-made wealth. The eldest son, Francis, received his father’s inherited property and half of all mines. Charles (1768-1834) was left the lucrative shares in the mining business and all associated properties, including smelting works, mills, closes, roads, and the other half of the mines. In the continuation of the family’s lead empire, the elder Francis laid out the indenture in his will that granted Charles mineral rights beneath the younger Francis’s property in exchange for fees and damages. Charles became Charles Hurt, Esq. of Wirksworth and his elder brother became the new Francis Hurt, Esq. of Alderwasley. To judge by the senior Francis’s will, while the younger Francis was to inherit a position like his grandfather’s, Charles was to continue in his father’s footsteps. It is surely no coincidence that when he and his wife desired in c.1789-90 to have their portraits painted, they chose the same artist to whom his parents sat. (Her father also sat to Wright in c. 1789.) Compared to his father’s portrait, Charles’s likeness is often dismissively described as merely depicting the privileged son of a great industrialist; however, such a simplistic view is problematic in light of the subject’s own achievements and interests. Not to be overshadowed by his father’s success, Charles professionalized his industrial role, becoming not simply a mine-owner and lead smelter, but an amateur engineer. He used his expert knowledge to plan the boring of soughs, the lengths and depths of which had never been before achieved. Draining (or ‘unwatering’) mines allowed Hurt to exploit the mineral resources in the Wapentake of Wirksworth in subterraneous areas that would have otherwise been inaccessible. Often the construction of these soughs and the drainage of mines utilized the latest equipment in industrial technology—the steampowered reciprocating ‘fire’ engine, perfected and patented by Lunar Society member James Watt. The ingenious designs of the soughs often directed the run-off towards water-powered mills along the Derwent River. This was particularly important to both the local and national economies, since the river’s natural current was increasingly interrupted as more mills sprang up along its banks.49 Hurt’s expertise was gleaned, no doubt, from years of experience under the tutelage of his father. However, a broad but practical knowledge of

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subjects like mathematics, mineralogy, geology, mechanics, and astronomy was probably self-taught. At his death in the early-nineteenth century, Hurt’s library was auctioned at Wirksworth, comprising about 1,500 lots. The subjects ranged from mathematics and natural history to Classical, French and Italian literature.50 In 1853 his vast and impressive collection of minerals and ancient coins and medals was auctioned at Sotheby’s. Of the 114 lots of minerals, 40 lots specifically mention pieces of galena and/or other types of lead ore (lead phosphate, lead oxide, lead carbonate).51 Several display cabinets were also sold. Hurt’s professional success, social status, and education afforded him the means to be a collector and connoisseur of mineralogical and numismatic specimens— products of natural and human history respectively.52 The display of ancient numismatic collections allowed for visual comparisons based on style, age, condition, denomination, and metallic content toward a qualitative appreciation of aesthetics and historical value. A similar method, when applied to mineralogical collections, yielded comparison by size, shape, type, purity, rarity, source, and condition toward a qualitative appreciation of aesthetics and natural historical value. Aestheticization and historical evaluation, therefore, united the gazes of the connoisseur and the virtuoso, proving that they were (and are) not always mutually exclusive.53 The intersection in such collections of these artistic and scientific concerns at the juncture of history parallels my arguments in the previous chapter about Wright’s Derbyshire landscape paintings regarding the subtle relationship among the landscape, Vulcanist geology, lead mining, and Roman Britain. Subjects such as Matlock HighTor physically embody the continuity of both human history (from the Roman era) and natural history in the ‘plastic clues’ of the location itself. In light of the fact that lead mining was known to have taken place in Derbyshire continuously since antiquity, it seems plausible to suggest that families like the Hurts saw themselves as inheritors of a classical tradition.54 Nicolson described Wright’s Portrait of Charles Hurt (c. 1789-90) as showing the young man “in a position to take life as it comes…. out walking with hat, cane and gloves.”55 Like Brooke Boothby, he is dressed rather fashionably for his rustic surroundings. He wears a tight-fitting, high-cut frock coat, striped waistcoat with watch fob, tight breeches, and artois shoe buckles. He holds a medium-brimmed round hat in one hand and an elegantly slender, carved, wooden walking stick in the other. He stands in a sinuous contrapposto pose in a Derbyshire landscape that, until now, has not been identified.

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Having traversed much of the area between Derby City and Matlock, and after consulting local mining historians, I recognize the landscape featured behind Charles Hurt as distinctive with its rolling hills, rather than sharp, rock-faced cliffs. It is Crich, seen from a distance across the Derwent River. The particular arrangement of hills depicted in the painting may be seen specifically from the grounds of Alderwasley Hall, Hurt’s ancestral home, which is now a private boarding school. To see it, one must alight at the Whatstandwell train station, cross the Whatstandwell bridge and take New Road up hill approximately one mile to the main entry drive to the Alderwasley Hall school. Beyond the main drive, off Higg Lane, is a footpath that leads to a sheep pasture adjacent to the school grounds. From here, looking back east toward the river and railway, one sees the hills of the Liberty of Crich. A stone’s throw to the north (left) is Alderwasley Hall and to the northwest is Wirksworth. The location would have made perfect sense for Charles Hurt, who was caught somewhere between familial prominence and industrial entrepreneurship. It situates the man literally between his ancestral home, which he did not inherit, and the productive mines in Crich and Wirksworth, which he did.56 The companion double-portrait of Susannah Hurt (née Arkwright) and Her Daughter Mary Anne (c. 1789-90) also includes a Derbyshire landscape setting. The previous (anonymous) owner of both portraits pointed out that Cromford Bridge appears in the distant background of Susannah Hurt and thought it may indicate her location on the property of Rock House—the original family home of the Arkwrights before Willersley Castle was built.57 Significantly, at about the same time as both portraits of the young Hurts were done, Wright painted two landscape views of Cromford—Arkwright’s Mill by Daylight and Willersley Castle. A large limestone outcropping called Scarthin Nick, which forms a natural dividing wall that follows the length of the Derwent, physically separates these two monuments to Arkwright’s industrial success. One end of the Nick appears both in the left foreground of Arkwright’s Mill and in the right foreground of Willersley, indicating that the two were probably meant to be seen side by side. Perched atop a hill to the southeast of Masson Mills, Willersley Castle faces the Derwent. Directly across the river from Willersley is a footpath that runs parallel to the river at the base of Scarthin Nick, on the other side of which are the mill and Mill Road, which leads to Cromford Bridge. At the far (eastern) end of the Nick, the footpath curves around it towards Mill Road, into what is now the parking lot for the restored mill complex and museum. The opposite (western) end of Scarthin Nick terminates on the other side of what is now the A6; a

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passage was blasted through the rock to allow for construction of the access road. Wright depicts Susannah Hurt and her daughter seated in a shallow rocky niche. They are as fashionably dressed as Charles. Susannah wears a wide-brimmed straw hat and a relatively simple linen dress with silk accessories. Mary Anne wears a loose fitting white linen tunic over a yellow underskirt. Such clothing was de rigueur for a child of any Briton familiar with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It allowed children a freedom of movement necessary for their unfettered exploration of the world around them. Indeed, Mary Anne is about to boost herself on her mother’s thigh in order better to reach the butterfly that evades her grasp. In short, she is shown with a child’s curiosity.58 This behavior would have been familiar to Wright, who raised his own children in the manner Rousseau recommended. A natural curiosity and the initiative to pursue it is something Mary Anne surely had in common with her father and grandfathers.59 It has been suggested that Susannah and Mary Anne have been placed on the grounds of the original Arkwright residence, Rock House, with Cromford Bridge in the distance at right. However, Rock House would not have afforded such a clear view of the bridge without Arkwright’s sevenstoried mill getting in the way. Additionally, the other side of the bridge with its gothic pointed arches would have been visible; however, the painting shows the side with round arches. The bridge would also not line up with the smelting chimney smoldering in the distant hills. The same chimney is seen in Wright’s Arkwright’s Mill by Daylight in the hills, just right of center. If one looked towards Cromford Bridge from Rock House the chimney would be to the right of (and slightly behind) the viewer. Therefore, the view must be from the other side of the bridge, from the eastern-most part of the Scarthin outcropping, probably from the Mill side, where there is a similar niche, although it is presently overgrown with vegetation. At such close range, the shallow niche would have completely obscured Arkwright’s new mansion across the river, which was nearing completion. As Arkwright’s church (St. Mary’s) was not yet built, the view of the bridge would have been unimpeded. Moreover, from such a vantage point the bridge and smelting chimney would line up correctly. Susannah and Mary Anne face in a westerly direction, roughly towards the Via Gellia. They are, therefore, appropriately positioned between Hurt and Arkwright territory as it were. The Via Gellia is not an ancient Roman road, but the faux latinized name of the road that runs through a steepsided, deep valley named for the Gell family of Hopton Hall, who once owned the surrounding land. The valley runs westwards from Cromford to

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Hopton Wood where it meets the road to Wirksworth.60 In recent decades quarrying (which continues) and the construction of the A5012 have somewhat reduced the scenic magnificence of the area. The Via Gellia would have been a very important location for Charles Hurt and his family for two reasons. Firstly, as has already been mentioned, the Hurts and the Gells intermarried—most recently with the union of Charles’s parents; his mother was Mary Gell. The Gell valley was thus part of both families’ histories. Secondly, the Via Gellia was an important site for lead mining until the 1830s; parts were even reworked on two occasions in the twentieth century. Before the eighteenth century, shafts were sunk into the hilltops as miners worked the upper veins. During the eighteenth century, however, adits (horizontal tunnels) were driven into the hillsides to allow access to lower, deeper veins. The driving of soughs was often necessary to ‘unwater’ these mines—a labor-intensive procedure that did not prove financially viable until the latter third of the century when efficient, cost-effective machinery was used in combination with the professional expertise of early mining engineers like Charles Hurt. In April 1778, Francis Hurt the elder recorded that the Good Luck Vein was in possession of the Crich Mine partners.61 This vein had been found in the Good Luck Mine—one of several adits driven into the southern hillside of the Via Gellia.62 Charles inherited his father’s lucrative share and no doubt used his expertise to exploit the mineral resources at even greater depths. The painted landscape in Wright’s portrait of him, therefore, recalls Charles’s lineage—one inseparable from Derbyshire lead mining—and his own industrial and professional interests, while that of his wife and child recalls Susannah’s family wealth and the history of powerful marital alliances in the Hurt line. The two companion portraits are not, therefore, simply about depicting second-generation industrialists who are able to reap the fruits of their fathers’ labors. True, they are well dressed and prosperous. But the specific landscapes in which they are depicted symbolize the familial and industrial origins of that prosperity. Not frivolous displays of ostentatious privilege, these paintings, seen together, are, rather, a serious celebration of lineage and property, encapsulating the marriage of two people from historically important and powerful families—one old and the other new. Susannah’s father, Sir Richard Arkwright, along with Jedediah Strutt, unwittingly developed the socio-economic phenomenon of the factory town—the former in Cromford and Matlock Bath, the latter in Belper— that would be the models for industrial growth throughout the lateeighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Formerly a barber and peruke-maker in Lancashire, Arkwright traveled to Nottingham in 1768 with an idea for

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a cotton-spinning machine but little money. An eventual partnership with Strutt and a Nottingham hosier, Samuel Need, gave him the capital he needed to begin what would become his “empire.” In 1769 Arkwright obtained a patent for his machine [Fig. 2-3] and in 1771 the partners decided to build their mill at Cromford, where it could be powered by the river. Arkwright’s spinning machine would thus become known as a “water-frame jenny.” Whether the design was his own invention or merely a minor improvement on someone else’s is still a matter of debate; however, at the very least, his business acumen is evidenced by his foresight to obtain a patent. The water-frame made him a fortune not only by its use in his mills at Cromford, but also because its patent gave him exclusive rights to sell and to license the use of it to other mill owners. The result was that the textile business in Britain grew to become one of the nation’s biggest industries, of utmost importance to the national economy.63

Fig. 2-3. Arkwright’s Spinning Machine Patent (1769). © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library, London.

By the mid 1770s Arkwright wanted to patent the entire spinning process, including an improved carding machine. Lewis Paul had already invented a hand-powered carding machine in 1748, consisting of a carding cylinder operated by a crank. It mechanized the process previously

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performed by children, who worked raw cotton between two hand-held combs called “cards”—wooden blocks covered with metal spikes on one side. In this early system the cotton fibers usually carded by children were rolled and then spun into thread by their mothers. Arkwright’s water-frame pulled the machine-carded rolls from large bobbins through his patented system of rollers, making fine thread that was mechanically spun onto spindles. Having all this apparatus—carding machines and water-frames— functioning under one roof at Cromford, powered by water, was a remarkable feat of industrial ingenuity. In 1775 Arkwright’s allencompassing carding patent was granted. The following year his workers erected the second mill building at Cromford, doubling production capacity. In an effort to retain control of his spinning monopoly, Arkwright decided in 1781 to take legal action to curb what might have become rampant infringement on his carding patent. After his attorneys collected the briefs against nine offenders, they were surprised to lose the first case against Charles Lewis Mordaunt of Halsall. Mordaunt’s defence was as simple and successful as it was unexpected. He did not deny that he had infringed Arkwright’s patent but pleaded that the specification was void because it was obscure and incomplete.64

Six hours later, the jury found in favor of the defendant and Arkwright decided not to pursue the other eight cases lest he lose his patent entirely. Two years later he applied to Parliament for an extension of the carding patent to 1789, but petitions from Lancashire manufacturers against his monopoly led to the denial of his request. Art historians have pointed out that Wright intended to paint Arkwright’s portrait in 1783 in addition to portraits of the industrialist’s children. The commission was inexplicably postponed until c. 1789. Just before requesting an extension of his carding patent, however, Arkwright’s life was threatened in an anonymous letter from a man in Manchester. The industrialist published the letter, offering a reward of one hundred guineas for the name of the author.65 Between the legal fees incurred from 1781, the death threat, and the marshalling of forces for the extension of the carding patent, Arkwright clearly had other things on his mind than having his portrait painted. Moreover, in the meantime, he turned his attention to those who infringed on his first patent of 1769. The main component of his patented spinning machine—a set of cotton rollers—appears in the form of a miniature model in Wright’s Sir Richard Arkwright [Plate 2-2]. The entire apparatus is described and illustrated in

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Arkwright’s original patent [Fig. 2-3]: a power source (water, horse or machine) turns a series of cogs and wheels, …which gives motion to the wheel H, and continues it to I, four pair of rollers…, which act by tooth and pinion, made of brass and steel nutts, fixt in two iron plates K. That part of the roller which the cotton runs through is covered with wood, the top roller with leather, and the bottom one fluted, which lets the cotton, &c. through it, and by one pair of rollers moving quicker than the other, draws it finer for twisting, which is performed by the spindles, T.66

In Arkwright, Wright depicts the rollers upside down so that they lay flat on the table. Thus, the reddish, leather covered ones are depicted as the bottom set. R.S. Fitton tells us that three scale models were employed by Arkwright’s attorneys in his 1785 suit against Peter Nightingale, accused of infringing on the 1769 water-frame patent. One was a model of an old spinning machine in use before the patent, a second made exactly to the patent’s specifications, and a third built to Nightingale’s improved design.67 The purpose was to show how little difference there was between the second and third models; the point being that the defendant had infringed on the plaintiff’s patent. Lunar Society members James Watt and Erasmus Darwin testified that the machine (represented by the second and third models) could be built from the specifications and drawing in the original patent document alone, discounting the defense’s argument that its instructions were vague and subject to interpretation and improvement not covered by the patent. Five witnesses also testified that they had built Arkwright’s machine from the instructions alone, before ever having seen them in operation at Cromford. Arkwright’s suit, which owed much to the use of models and expert mechanical testimony, was successful.68 He was awarded the sum for which he asked—1s. The model depicted in Arkwright specifically recalls the successful suit against Nightingale of just four years earlier. Moreover, like Hurt’s galena, the cotton rollers represent the basic source of Arkwright’s wealth. Thus, they allude both to the industrially productive real property of the mills and machinery as well as to the lucrative legal property of the 1769 patent. Arkwright’s proud, almost defiant pose lays claim to his invention, to his nearly monopolistic control over the British cotton-spinning industry. Wright’s portraits of Francis, Charles and Susannah Hurt and Sir Richard Arkwright feature depictions of real property—private, industrial, legal, and inherited—to indicate and to define visually the sitters’ sources of wealth. This type of cultural self-fashioning was common among the rising class of prosperous British industrialists in the late-eighteenth century. For the Physiocrats, agricultural production (and thereby land)

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was the measure of national wealth. But, as I have already mentioned, Adam Smith extended the definition of production to include mining (the farming of minerals) and manufactures. Thus, the Hurts, the Arkwrights, and others like them surely recognized their own socioeconomic importance, not only on a local level among the East Midlands, but also in the larger national context of British industrial wealth. Wright’s portraits take on new significance when we understand them as concise statements of social and economic power rooted in the value of tangible property. Moreover, he was the perfect artist to depict them as such. William Hogarth had already famously lampooned the relationships among the classes of English society in his satirical series of paintings, especially The Marriage Contract from Marriage à la Mode; but the mingling of the impoverished aristocracy and the prosperous middling classes was a fact of life in eighteenth-century Britain. Such an atmosphere somewhat blurred the lines of class and birth and gave Wright entrée to some exclusive social circles. He numbered among his friends physicians, landed gentry, military officers, industrialists, successful merchants, and lower-level aristocrats. The firm belief that idle hands do the devil’s handiwork fueled the ambitious work ethic that established these men as the financial pillars of the Midlands. Not owning a factory, Wright participated in his own way, linking himself to this burgeoning local patriciate as a fair landlord, honest money lender, charitable artist, and caring mentor. This was an affiliation based on parochial pride, mutual respect and ethics, much different from the contempt and prejudice Wright encountered in the London art establishment after the founding of the Royal Academy, which may have been but one more reason he chose to remain primarily in Derby. Therefore, Wright was not ‘stuck’ in Derbyshire unable to make it as an artist in London. Rather, I have demonstrated for the first time that he was a man of independent means who did not (at least after 1767) need to paint for money. He chose to remain primarily in Derby because he had vested personal and financial interests there and was the equal of his friends and patrons in the intellectually rich and diverse East Midlands.

Notes 1

Such a view may not overtly appear in published scholarship—although there are instances perhaps where one might read between the lines—but it has been readily conveyed to me on many occasions since I began to study Wright in 1997. Many seem to know about the artist’s provincial origins, his missteps and failures, and his inability to achieve the status that other artists cultivated for themselves in

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London and/or Bath, but little is known of the reasons why Wright chose to remain primarily in Derby. The consensus: He’s a good artist, but he’s no Reynolds or Gainsborough. 2 The Public Advertiser (London, April 27, 1785), 2: “The exhibition contains no less than six hundred and fifty different performances; a prodigious number, when it is considered that upwards of two hundred were refused admittance, and that several capital artists do no exhibit with the Royal Academy, viz. Mr. Wright, Mr. Gainsborough, Mr. Romney, Mr. Stubbs, Mr. Marlow, &c. The first of these gentlemen (Mr. Wright) has opened an Exhibition, consisting entirely of his own works; they are but few in number, but in point of merit are such as do infinite credit to his abilities. In a certain line of his profession, and in certain lights, Mr. Wright of Derby is unrivalled; being in some respects superior to any artist either ancient or modern; no man has so happily represented the different effects of light, whether proceeding from the moon, fire or candle.” 3 “The inimitable Wright, of Derby, once expressed an ardent desire to be admitted a member of the Academy, but from what unaccountable reason his wishes were frustrated remains as yet a secret to the world; but the sagacious, or, rather, the envious brethren of the brush thought proper to thrust so eminent an artist on one side to make way for so contemptible an animal as Edmund Garbage [Garvey]. They had scarcely invested this insignificant mushroom with diplomatic honours before they discovered that they had been committing a most atrocious, diabolical, and bloody murder upon two gentlemen of great respectability and character, ycleped Genius and Justice; and the pangs of their wounded consciences became so very troublesome, that it was resolved, in a full divan, instantly to dispatch Secretary Prig to Derby with the diploma, and force these august privileges and distinctions upon the disappointed painter, that he had before solicited in vain. But, alas! the expedition was inauspicious and unfortunate; the diploma was rejected with the most evident marks of contempt, and the Secretary kicked as a recompense for his presumption.” Quoted in Bemrose, The Life and Works, 61. 4 Elizabeth Barker has done an excellent job compiling and editing Wright’s papers, which she published recently in the Walpole Society journal. See Barker, ‘Documents Relating to Joseph Wright “of Derby” (1734-1797),’ in The SeventyFirst Volume of the Walpole Society (2009): 1-216. Although I personally consulted the primary archival documents, which I cite below, in 2000-2001 and again in 2004 and 2005, I also include reference to Barker’s more easily accessible edition. 5 Wright to Boydell, December 12, 1786, DLSL (Barker, 122-123, letter 74): “I also understood… that you [Boydell] had classed the painters, & that the first, in wch. you had placed me, was to have 300 [guineas] a picture & more if the work met wth. encouragement to enable to do so, I find by my friend Mr. French, that in the papers I am promiscuously named sometimes in one class & sometimes in another wch. I think very wrong….” Wright argued later that by not paying him the same money as Reynolds and West, he would “not only lose the pecuniary advantage, but endanger my reputation, a point which I consider of far greater moment.” (Wright to William Hayley, December 23, 1786. DLSL. See also

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Barker, 123, letter 75.) Boydell responded: “‘…I am free to confess that had I ever presumed to have classed the historical painters of this country, perhaps Mr. Wright’s name would not have stood exactly where he has been pleased to place it himself.’” (Quoted in Nicolson, 156.) 6 Joseph Farington, The Diary of Joseph Farington, eds. Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre (London: Yale University Press, 1978), vol. III, 683-684. The entry is dated October 28, 1796. 7 Wright to Daniel Daulby, 4 June 1780. DLSL. Wright sold the painting for 40 guineas instead of 100. See also Barker, 97, letter 36. 8 Wright to John Leigh Philips, 29 November 1792. DLSL. See also Barker, 143, letter 112. 9 Wright to Philips, 19 February 1794: “It [Philips’ invitation for Wright’s daughter Hannahh Romana to accompany him and Mrs. Philips home to Manchester] happens unluckily for Romana wou’d have been glad to have attended you & Mrs. P to Manchester but the 2d of next month we part wth. our present servants, & it wd. not be agreeable to leave me wth strangers [i.e., new servants].” Wright to Philips, 7 June 1795: Wright sends cucumber seeds to Philips “for your cultivation, wch. I wish you to attend to for if the Gardiner has not deceived me, I think you will find ‘em excellent.” Both letters in DLSL. See also Barker, 147, letter 118, and 152, letter 126, respectively. 10 Wedgwood Archive, 677-1. Recto: “For Joseph Wright Esqr. Derby // a table service green shell edge, for his own use, gratis, about 10 guineas value to be looked out very good….” Verso: “Joseph Wright Esq rece’d March 7, 1789.” 11 Wright, “Account Book,” Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery, London. See also Barker, 9-61. 12 Wright (Rome) to his sister Nancy (at Mr. Hurleston’s in London), 13 April 1774. DLSL. See also Barker, 79, letter 15. 13 “Account Book,” fol. 18. Folio 23 also shows how Wright lent money to Mr. Thomas Moss Tate for two year’s board, totaling £68.14s. See also Barker, 18-19 and 22. 14 Ibid., fols. 27-29 (Barker, 23-25). These pages are in a different hand and neatly divided into credits on the left page and debits on the right. The initial heading reads “Brothers Accounts” and the dates run from September 1773 through October 25, 1775, which leads me to believe that Wright’s brother Richard kept up his account book while he was away in Italy. The early beginning date of September may be the result of the date on the bill listed as having been received on that date, which arrived by post, and may have actually been received in October. Or Wright may have gone somewhere else first—to get married perhaps. Also lines like “Paid for a [letter] from [Hurleston] to remit you 20 pds.” (my emphasis) indicate Richard was writing to Joseph for his benefit upon return. 15 Ibid., passim (See also Barker, 4-5): Wright received £10 per half year from John Ford (1775-78), £12 per year from Mr. Hopkinson (1775-78), £8 per year from Anthony Wilde (c. 1775), £21.10s per year from Thomas Coltman, Esq. (1774-76), £12 per year from W. Fallows, Jr. (1781-83), an unspecified amount per year from Mr. Lowe (1783-89), £10.10s per half year from Richard Stortin (1783-

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87), £10.3s per half year from Mr. Grayson (1788-89), £2.4s.6d from Mr. Booths for rent of a house and coal house (1789), £16.10s per half year for 3 closes from James Bromley (1789-97), £10.15s per half year from Francis Radford (1789-97), and £12 per year from Gilbert Bridge (1789-97). 16 DLSL. See also Barker, 84, letter 19. 17 Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Tour Through the East of England: Being the Register of a Journey Through Various Counties of this Kingdom (London: W. Strahan, 1771), 4 vols. “I took the road to Chatsworth [from Matlock] through a country wholly inclosed, that lets from 10s to 20s an acre.” (I, 211) “From Chatsworth to Tiddswell [Tideswell] the country is nineteenths [9/10ths] of it inclosed and cultivated: this surprised me, as I expected to find the chief part of the Peak waste land; but such great improvements have been carried on in this country, that even sheep-walks too rocky to plough, let at 5s an acre.” (I, 213) “Rents throughout the Peak are raising everyday; in particular the duke of Devonshire is advancing his estates to a much higher value than formerly.... [T]he rise of rents on inclosing is uncommonly great, from 2s6d to 12s…, nor is it for good land already in culture, but for wasteland to be improved and at the tenants [sic.] expence.” (I, 218) That expense included the cost of the lime to rid the land of ‘black ling’ to allow grass to grow for pasture. See also: John M. Bestall, “Enclosures and Stone Walls,” Derbyshire Miscellany (October 1958, vol. 1, part 10), 151-154, which focuses on Young’s 1770 visit to Derbyshire and his description thereof in The Farmer’s Tour. 18 “Account Book,” passim (See also Barker, 1-5). Fol. 25 (Barker, 23): “Sr. B. Boothby’s bond commenced March 26, 1781 for £129.3s. 0 to pay lawful Int[erest].—copy of the receipt on the back ye bond—Recd. 16th Jan.y 1790 of Sr. B. Boothby fifty eight pounds, one shilling and two pence for nine years Int. from the 26th March 81 to d[itt]o. 90.” Of this, the full-length portrait of Boothby accounted for only £50.8s.0d. (fol. 66, Barker, 42) Francis Beresford later paid Wright £188.0s.11d on July 19, 1787, “being the principal [balance] and Int[erest]. for such pictures as were sold to Brooke Boothby Esq. after the bond was given.” (fol. 60, Barker, 39) 19 On April 27, 1787 Wright received from Messrs. Parkynson and Byron half a year’s interest on a mortgage loan of £600 on an estate at Spondon. See also Barker, 4. 20 Farington, III, 671, October 4, 1796: “[John L.] Philips told Westall that Wright of Derby is in a very bad state of health…. He is in very good [financial] circumstances. Westall understood from Philips that Wright is worth £25000.” 21 Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties, 574-575. 22 John M. Bestall, “Enclosures and Stone Walls,” Derbyshire Miscellany (October 1958, vol. 1, no. 10): 152. See also: W.E. Tate, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, “Enclosure Acts and Awards Relating to Derbyshire,” Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (1944-45): 1-65. 23 Gisborne, 575. 24 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI, “On the Rent of Land,” passim.

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Gisborne, 575: “The due cultivation of the ground, by which expression I mean the extracting from the earth the greatest possible quantity of the most valuable produce which it can be made permanently to afford, obviously renders the largest profits to the owner. And at the same time it produces no less conspicuously the good of the state…. by augmenting the quantity and reducing the price of provisions, or of commodities which may be exchanged for provisions, and thus contributing to the settlement of families and the increase of population.” My emphasis. 26 I have already shown how the members of the Derby Philosophical Society were familiar with Smith’s brand of physiocratic economics, The Wealth of Nations being part of the society’s circulating library. 27 It is possible Hurleston, though not an orphan, was of similarly humble origins. 28 Wright to Wedgwood, January 22, 1789. Collection of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston. See Barker, 126, letter 81. 29 Wright to Wedgwood, February 5, 1789. Collection of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston. See Barker, 127-128, letter 83. 30 Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties, 574-575. My emphasis. See also: Ibid., “On the Situation of the Mining Poor,” in Georgical Essays, edited by A. Hunter (York: T. Wilson and R. Spence, 1803), vol. 2, pp. 148-168. This is primarily an essay about the generational vice and ill behavior of miners. It is seemingly more of a criticism of their lifestyle than an essay exposing injustices towards them and how to rectify them. 31 The politicization of the lead-mining industry in Derbyshire is documented and discussed by Andy Wood in The Politics of Social Conflict, 100-15, 297-311. Much of his evidence viz. the eighteenth century comes from the Wooley Manuscripts in the collection of the British Library. 32 Wood, 109-10: “…parish officers and the magistracy responded to the immiseration of the poor and the landless with blunt severity. The poor came to be viewed not as a threatening mass, but as a fixed, certain social fact. That social fact required discipline, but could be made useful. In line with the contemporary mercantilist theory, ‘manufactures’ were introduced for the parish poor. The object was to set the paupers to useful work, while providing a disincentive to obtaining parish relief. Attempts at industrial diversification within the Peak were specifically directed towards the poor. In Wirksworth, the poor were set to ‘manufactures’; in the High Peak to building walls which enclosed the commons on which they had so recently depended. With the decrease in lead prices in the1740s, the habit was renewed.” See also R.S. Fitton and A.P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758-1830: A Study of the Early Factory System (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), 104 and 225. 33 Fitton and Wadsworth, 225 and Pilkington, A View of the Present State of Derbyshire, 237-238. 34 Wood, 100: “By the Restoration, the most powerful noble and gentry families had withdrawn from direct contact with the lead industry, remaining content in their parasitic exaction of manorial tolls as lords or lessees of Duchy rights.... The elite social group which contributed most capital to the post-Restoration industry,

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and which took the closest interest in it, was the mercantile lesser gentry. It has been estimated that by the Restoration some 70 percent of the gentry families of north and west Derbyshire possessed some interest in mining. At that time, a surprisingly large number of wealthier artisans, farmers and even a scattering of free miners also held shares in large mines, or became partners in drainage operations. The significance of this last group of investors declined over the course of the eighteenth century, as the industry as whole became increasingly concentrated into the hands of the mercantile gentry.” 35 Ibid., 100-15, 297-311. 36 Ibid., 297-311, and British Library Additional MSS 6676, fols. 1-41, 44-9, 65-7, 96-131; 6677, fols. 65-6; 6679, fols. 44, 50-3, 96-131; 6681, fols. 335-58, 370, 432-3, 440-45; 6683, fol. 126; 6686, fols. 1-37, 82-104. 37 British Library Add. MSS 6681, fols. 370 and 796ff.: Manuscript notes for a book never published called The Laws and Customs of the Lead Mines In the Several Hundreds, Wapentakes, Lordships and Manors in the County of Derby by Richard Spencer of Middle Temple, Esq., c. 1735. See also BL Add. MSS 6681, fols. 657-703: A Letter to a Friend on the Mineral Customs of Derbyshire (London, 1766) by an anonymous author, purported to be written by Benjamin Franklin as a favor to Anthony Tissington. “[It] was wrote by Dr. Benjamin Franklin. the celebrated patriot & champion of American liberty & independence; during one of his visits to Mr. Anthony Tissington of Swanwick in the County of Derby. at whose desire it was wrote, & by whom the subject matter was suggested…. It was intended by Mr. Tissington to rouse the interested passions of the common working miners to oppose a very just demand made on them by Mrs. [John] Rowls (lessee of the dutchy) of lot on smytham, & perhaps might be sufficiently calculated for that purpose notwithstanding its defects.” (fol. 657) Following the success of the duke of Devonshire’s suit against the miners, John Rowls (or Rolles), lessee of the King’s Field for another part of the Derbyshire Peak, filed a similar case against the miners of that area. Upon his death, his widow continued the suit for the benefit of Rowls’ heirs. 38 British Library Add. MSS 6681, fols. 657-703 and 6677 fols. 65-6. See also Derby Mercury (July 7, July 17, and September 11, 1772). 39 Derby Mercury (July 10, 1772). 40 John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Henry Colburn, 1847): The Lowe family was established by “‘one of the captaynes who fought under Duke William of Normandye, in the conquest of England.’”(vol. 1, 768) Thomas Lowe of Macclesfield and Alderwasley died in 1415. On January 12, 1670 Nicholas Hurt, Esq. of Castern (d. 1711) married Elizabeth (d. 1713), daughter and heiress of John Lowe, Esq. of Alderwasley and sister and heiress of John Lowe, Esq. of the same. Nicholas’s and Elizabeth’s son was Charles Hurt, Esq. of Alderwasley (d. 1763). His son and heir, Nicholas, died in 1767, survived by his brother Francis, who was painted by Wright. In 1751, Francis married Mary, daughter of Thomas Gell, Apothecary, of the Gatehouse, Wirksworth (1679-1755) and Cassandra Gell (née Lowe), daughter and co-heiress of Edward Lowe, Esq. of Alderwasley.

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Information on the Lowes and the Gells is from Burke’s Landed Gentry (London: Burke’s Peerage Ltd., 1972) vol. 1, 458-9, and vol. 3, 368-9 respectively. Innumerable references to Lowe and Gell family members appear in the Wooley Manuscripts in the collection of the British Library, which relate primarily to the legalities of the lead industry in and around Derbyshire from at least the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. 41 Thomas Hudson, Portrait of the Earl of Macclesfield (c. 1751) in the collection of the Royal Society of London. The date of the portrait coincides with Wright’s study under Hudson, and the Derby painter may well have had a hand in its completion. 42 According to the Trustees: “Mr. Hurt, Mr. [Peter] Nittingale [Nightingale] and others were the Sough Masters [or]… the Lords [of the Manor of Crich] as they call’d them[selves].” 43 The Hospital Trustees claimed that the hospital was “a Private or Close Manor wherein there are Mines but no one has a right to enter any Mine wthout Special Agreemt. wth. the Owners of the Soil or those who claym under them.” British Library Add. MSS 6677, fols. 239-44. 44 British Library Add. MSS 6677, fols. 239-44. 45 Ibid., fols. 239-44. 46 Ibid., fol. 256. The letter is signed ‘Fras: Hurt, Alderwasley 25th April 76’. 47 Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock, Hurt Family Papers: “Veins Belonging [to] Crich Mine.” No page numbers. My emphasis. ‘Ditto’ refers to the repetition of the date from the previous entry—i.e., April 1, 1782. 48 Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock, Hurt Family Papers. The manuscript will is dated February 13, 1782. 49 For example, in 1780 Matthew Boulton and James Watt, Lunar Society members and industrial partners, provided Sir Richard Arkwright with an eight horse-power ‘fire’ (steam) engine to pump subterraneous water into the Derwent to increase the supply to his mill. By “this time there were two mills at Cromford, the supply of water from Cromford Sough may have proved inadequate.” Fitton and Wadsworth, 80. 50 Egerton, 209. 51 Sotheby and Wilkinson, Catalogue of Minerals of the Late Charles Hurt, Esq. Sold at Sotheby and Wilkinson, London, 6 June 1853. Hurt’s coin and medals collection, including numismatic books, was sold on June 9, 1853, containing 166 lots. Both catalogues are preserved in the collection of the British Library. 52 In lieu of evidence to suggest Hurt had either tutors or a formal education, it is reasonable to believe, judging by his extensive library, that he was an autodidact. 53 Evidence of this is also found in Wedgwood’s correspondence in which he discusses his activities as shell collector: “…I have got my face over a shell drawer, & find my self in imminent danger of becoming a connoisseur. You can scarcely conceive the progress I have made in a month or two in the deep & very elaborate science of shell fancying. Having aranged my whole collection in the most systematic manner, & studied them with the nicest attention, I can tell you, at sight, the difference between a Lunare, & a Semi Lunare—A Buccinum, & a

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Limpet, & many other nice distinctions which you, who are not so learned in these matters as my self, would not understand, & might therefore under value. But this study, alas [sic.], like every other extension of the human mind, as it multiplies the avenues to our enjoyments discloses new sources of wants & anxieties, & at this present writing I find myself undone for an Echintes Spalagoides Cretaceous, vulg. Toads a-se. I would not have soil’d my paper with the vulgar name if my author had not told me it was known by no other name in Kent. A Gracirrynchus or two would make a fine addition to my class of Glossopetra, & the Pectunculus minimus triquetrus subfuscus would make me the happiest of chonchiologists.” Wedgwood to Thomas Bentley, September 15, 1778 in the collection of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston. Microfilm reel XII, page 104. 54 In 1777 an ancient Roman pig of lead (a rough-hewn ingot) was found on Cromford Moor. It was inscribed IMP.CAS.HADRIANI AUG.MET.LUT, which is “broadly translated as ‘from Emperor Caesar Hadrian Augustus Metal Works at Lutudarum’ giving a date between 117 and 138 A.D. Lutudarum was the Roman lead mining centre, though its exact location is unknown. The most likely site is where the Roman road between Buxton (Aqua Arnemetiae) and Derby (Little Chester) crossed Hereward St. though this is now drowned beneath Carsington Water reservoir.” T.D. Ford and J.H. Rieuwerts, Lead Mining in the Peak District (Asbourne (Derbyshire): Landmark Publishing, 2000), 152. See also Samuel Pegge, “Remarks on an Antient Pig of Lead Lately Discovered in Derbyshire,” Archaeologia vol. 5, c. 1778 bound in British Library Add. MSS 6681, fols. 97079. 55 Nicolson, 162. 56 Many thanks to Lord Peter Naylor, who sits on the Barmote Court, and to David Barrie, both of the Goodluck Mine Preservation Society, for helping to identify the location as Crich. Thanks also to David for accompanying me in April 2008 to the southernmost part of the Alderwasley estate from the Ambergate side, which led me, the following day, to hike up to Alderwasley Hall from Whatstandwell. He also kindly gave me a guided tour of the interior of Goodluck Mine itself. 57 Egerton, 210. Since the Tate Gallery’s catalogue was published, the paintings of Charles Hurt and Susannah Hurt and Her Daughter were put on the market. Though their sale was handled by the Spink-Leger Gallery in London, the present owner(s) is unknown. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact the new owner(s) via the Spink-Leger Gallery, the author considers the paintings lost and reproduces them here from the Tate Gallery’s catalogue, which is considered to be in the public domain. 58 Her depiction recalls Thomas Gainsborough’s The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly (National Gallery, London, c. 1756) in which the two girls playfully attempt to capture the flying insect. 59 For Rousseau’s influence on the depiction of children in art see Dorothy Johnson, “Picturing Pedagogy: Education and the Child in the Paintings of Chardin,” Eighteenth-Century Studies (Fall 1990): 47-68 and James Christen Steward, The New Child: British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-

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1830 (Berkeley: University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in association with the University of Washington Press, 1995). 60 F. Wolverson Cope, Geology Explained in the Peak District (Cromford: Scarthin Books, 1998), 118. See also Ford and Rieuwerts, 154-55. 61 Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock, Hurt Family Papers. 62 I had the good fortune in April 2008 to tour the Good Luck Mine entering an adit off the Via Gellia, which dates from 1830. Many thanks again to my guide, David Barrie of the Goodluck Mine Preservation Society. 63 Fitton, The Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 91. 64 Ibid., 96. 65 Ibid., 101-02: “I will ashure shute you as your name is what it is dam you think the town must be ruled by such a Barber as you, take notice if you are in town on Saturday next I will make an end of you meet you wherever I can. I am not yours, but a friend to the town of Manchester.” 66 Arkwright’s spinning machine patent, 1769, reproduced in Fitton, 24-5. 67 Ibid., 107-08. 68 Ibid., 107-09.

CHAPTER THREE ROUSSEAU, BOTANY, MEDICINE: WRIGHT’S PORTRAIT OF BROOKE BOOTHBY

“No one will go seeking garlands for shepherdesses among herbs for enemas.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In this chapter I re-examine Joseph Wright’s Portrait of Brooke Boothby [Plate 3-1]. It is widely accepted that the painting was commissioned to commemorate the sitter’s publication of the first part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s manuscript, Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques, which Boothby smuggled out of France as a favor to the author.1 The picture is visually remarkable for the subject’s odd reclining pose, to my knowledge unique among eighteenth-century portraits of men before 1780. Previous scholars have often wondered why such an awkward composition was chosen, and Frederick Cummings has given the best reason to date— the pose is iconographically linked to a convention in Elizabethan art for representing a literary person as a melancholy intellectual reclining in a beautifully rustic setting.2 This has been the last word on the subject until now. My purpose here is not to contest the work of other scholars but to enrich further our contextual understanding of this painting, its subject, the artist, and how they all fit into the larger interdisciplinary history of the eighteenth century. To this end, I highlight other variables in the picture’s conception, showing how the enigmatic portrait is even more complex than previously thought. First, I believe there existed other factors in the decision to depict Boothby as he is, showing that Wright’s own oeuvre contains precedents for the composition. One of these in particular—a painting of Edwin, the protagonist in James Beattie’s poem The Minstrel—has also to do with the theme of melancholy. In addition, the study and isolated contemplation of Nature, as it pertains to the relief and/or enjoyment of melancholy, are also related themes underscoring the link between the two paintings. Next, while the visual presence of the physical volume of Rousseau’s Juge de Jean-Jacques is understood to be integral to Boothby’s iconographical

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concept, it is the text itself and the ideas it presents about the appreciation of Nature that are the keys to understanding the iconological meaning.3 Rousseau and Boothby each shared an interest in the appreciation of Nature, advocating the Linnaean system of botanical classification as a means to that end without the ‘ugly’ entanglements of pharmacology and medicine. The portrait shows its subject as a melancholy intellectual who is supposed to be the embodiment of a Rousseauian ideal, contemplating Nature for the sole purpose of pleasure—a very Romantic notion that fit his personal sensibility and class proclivities. The image of Boothby representing the Rousseauian ‘man of nature’ is, however, problematic for many reasons. It is, therefore, possible that such a portrayal was meant to be subtly ironic because it highlights the tension between the economic and medicinal utility of botany on the one hand, and the leisured study of plants on the other.4 This is a new, critical, and highly nuanced interpretation of the picture that is dependent on our acceptance of the artist’s intellectual abilities and shared interests with his sitter, which art historians have previously been unwilling to do. The Tate Gallery’s 1990 exhibition catalogue Wright of Derby deals with the iconographical elements of the Portrait of Brooke Boothby.5 Although it contains essays relating Wright to a larger intellectual and scientific context, the entry for Boothby merely dismisses the reclining subject’s importance by describing him as a minor poet whose “chief claim to fame lay not in his own works ... but in the fact that he was there when Rousseau needed him or someone like him,” and by relegating any further discussion of the man to the very end of the entry.6 He is identified as an acquaintance of Rousseau, not an admirer and friend, and as part of the Lichfield literary circle without any further discussion of how these facts focus our view of the portrait. The rest of the entry elaborates on Boothby’s role as publisher of Rousseau’s manuscript of the first dialogue of Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques in 1780, and on reiterating Cummings’s arguments about how the melancholic tradition in Elizabethan portraits accounts for Boothby’s reclining pose. The compiler fails to connect either Rousseau’s writings or Boothby’s personality to the melancholic iconography, or the baronet’s circle of friends to Wright’s own. Benedict Nicolson, in his landmark 1968 publication on the thenneglected Wright of Derby, was the first to connect the appearance of Rousseau’s manuscript in the artist’s Portrait of Boothby to the sitter’s close relationship to the philosophe.7 Boothby first met Rousseau while the latter was staying at Wooton Hall near Ashbourne from 1766-67, after having been exiled from both France and Switzerland. The future baronet was still in his early twenties, but the writings of Rousseau had already

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made a profound impression on him. Later, in 1776, while traveling through France en route from Italy to England, Boothby called on Rousseau in the rue Plâtrière. Rousseau described the visit as fortuitous: Je me dis: Voilà le dépositaire que la Providence m’a choisi.... Malheureusement, ma nouvelle copie [i.e., Rousseau, Juge de JeanJacques] n’étoit pas avancée, mais je me hâtai de lui remettre ce qui était fait, renvoyant à l’année prochaine à lui remettre le reste, si, comme je n’en doutois pas, l’amour de la vérité lui donnoit le zèle de revenir le chercher.8

Paranoid about the unpopularity of his publications that had previously led to exile, Rousseau felt the need to smuggle his most recent manuscript out of France. Boothby’s arrival was a perfect opportunity, except that the book was unfinished. The Englishman brought home only the first part of Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques in manuscript form and had it published at his own expense in 1780. Thus, Nicolson makes the important connection that Wright’s portrait of Boothby was commissioned to immortalize the achievement, the painting completed the following year.9 He also hints more generally at the connection between the ideas of Rousseau and the portrait of Boothby: Wright represents this virtuous and sensitive man, so far out of his world... reclining in a ‘certain vallon’ beside a stream surrounded by his botanical specimens, with a copy of Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, that had just come out of Lichfield, under his hand, in a Rousseau-like attitude....10

‘Rousseau-like’ may mean many things, but Cummings was the first art historian to examine what exactly Nicolson may have meant in relation to Wright’s portrait.11 In “Boothby, Rousseau, and the Romantic Malady,” Cummings discusses the portrait in terms of “emblematic content.” Among the elements he isolates are the subject, his pose, mood and attire, and the manuscript. He argues for a more complex, detailed interpretation of Boothby’s image, locating the origin of the pose within Elizabethan iconographical convention. His main example, the one that Wright may well have known through a print by Anthony Walker from 1764, is Isaac Oliver’s Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury. Cummings writes: The forest interior with a remote landscape framed by trees, the flowing brook in the foreground, the elegantly dressed knight, his head leaning on his crooked arm, his doublet untied, and his gaze riveted by endless space or some inner dream, his limbs splayed and clumsy, ... are used in both

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Cummings also carefully connects the reclining pose and other details to Elizabethan conventions for depicting a melancholic. His point is ultimately that by appropriating the pose and details of the landscape and the state of casual undress in the Portrait of Brooke Boothby, Wright also carried over the iconological meaning behind the elements of such reclining portraiture—that “we are in the presence of a melancholy intellectual.” Cummings further links the Renaissance concept of melancholia to the fashion in Elizabethan art for intellectuals to be portrayed with a melancholy humor that emphasized their propensity for things literary and artistic.13 Thus, the depiction of Boothby in a melancholy state is meant to suggest his creative, literary intellect. Boothby was indeed well read, multilingual, and a poet. He was also a member of Anna Seward’s literary circle in Lichfield and, later, of the Derby Philosophical Society. His participation in these groups, among others, linked him to many in the Lunar Society of Birmingham whose memberships overlapped. However, iconographically and iconologically, Wright’s Portrait of Brooke Boothby is not limited to the Elizabethan Portrait of Edward Herbert by Isaac Oliver. Indeed, Oliver’s use of the reclining pose in a serene landscape to illustrate a person of melancholic humor is neither his own invention nor a convention limited to the Elizabethan age.14 Wright’s own oeuvre contains at least two interesting iconographical precedents for Boothby. The first is a pen and ink drawing in one of the artist’s Italian sketchbooks [Fig. 3-1], inscribed by Wright in Rome “Mem.y Natu.e May 16_74.”15 It depicts a youthful male figure reclining on a pavement, asleep. He wears only a short, toga-like drapery that wraps around his mid-section and ties over his right shoulder. He could be a peasant and/or a pilgrim. But he may also be a life model Wright had seen at the French Academy in Rome, where he is known to have visited. The figure’s pose is remarkably similar to that of Boothby. Both men recline on their right sides, parallel to the picture plane. Each of their left arms bend at the elbow and hang over the front of their bodies. Their left legs are stretched relatively straight, supported beneath by bent right legs. While Boothby’s head rests between his thumb and forefinger, propped on the elbow that leans on a tree trunk, the drawn male’s head rests on his right bicep and shoulder, clutching a walking stick in the same hand. Wright replaced the attribute of the staff with Boothby’s copy of Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques, and changed the Roman street to an English glen. The hard pavement on which the male sleeps strangely

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appears to be more comfortable than Boothby’s earthy surroundings, the latter’s pose seemingly awkward and unnatural by comparison. More will be said on this incongruity in due course.

Fig. 3-1. Joseph Wright, Reclining Figure in Wright’s Italian Sketchbook (May 16, 1774). © The Trustees of the British Museum, London.

Another precedent in Wright’s oeuvre seems to have been Edwin, the protagonist of Beattie’s The Minstrel of 1777-78 [Fig. 3-2].16 Both Edwin and Boothby are shown in a similar landscape setting that terminates at a distant body of water. Each props his head on his open hand, leaning on the elbow, and both figures have their legs crossed at the knee, although Boothby reclines while Edwin sits. The minstrel’s tunic is unbuttoned, exposing slightly his bare chest, and his cuffs are likewise unfastened and rolled back. Similarly, the aristocrat’s topcoat is completely open in front, the cuffs unbuttoned, and the waistcoat is fastened only by the lower four buttons, leaving exposed the vertical ruffles of his chemise. The prominence of browns and other earth tones in each picture adds emphasis to the depiction of secluded nature, growing wildly and undisturbed by human intrusion. Boothby and Edwin alike are rather elaborately dressed for their woodsy surroundings; the latter’s clothes are “more genteel than the average reader of The Minstrel might have envisaged.”17 The effect of their youthful figures, natural surroundings, and dreamily pensive gazes is

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Fig. 3-2. Francis Seymour Hayden, after Joseph Wright, Edwin, a.k.a. Thomas Hayden (1864). Etching and drypoint. National Gallery, Washington, DC.

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an overall sense of the melancholy contemplation of nature in an Elizabethan sense.18 Even the flora depicted in each picture is similar, including Viola odorata (sweet violet), which was used as a purgative remedy in the treatment of melancholy—a theme common to both images. The fact that Wright conceived and executed the painting of Edwin, and, thus, of his own volition, decided to include this particular plant in the foreground, suggests that he already was aware of the medicinal value of sweet violet prior to painting Boothby. Such pharmaceutical knowledge could easily have come from either his brother Richard, a surgeon, or from his physician friends Erasmus Darwin and John Beridge.19 It could also have come from his Manchester friend, John Leigh Philips, whose natural history collection was strong in botany and which later formed the core of the Manchester Natural Historical Society Museum.20 More will be said about the significance of Wright’s botanical knowledge, but first let us consider his interest in Beattie’s poem. Wright had written to Beattie in 1778 to express his enthusiasm for The Minstrel and to say he was nearing completion of a painting of Edwin, asking if the author had any advice about how to make him readily recognizable, aside from the inclusion of the minstrel’s recorder. Beattie responded with a suggestion for a stanza to be included as an inscription: [Which, late,] exulting, view’d in Nature’s frame Goodness untainted, wisdom unconfined Grace grandeur and Utility combined.21

Thus, we know that Wright had read the poem himself. Moreover, the selected passage seems just as easily applicable to the Boothby portrait. It is quite possible then that when Boothby approached the artist about having his portrait painted, Wright recognized in him some Edwinian qualities. However, the connection I propose does not stop there, as will be explained shortly. The final emblematic element frequently discussed is the manuscript labeled “Rousseau,” which is presumed to be the first dialogue of Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques that Boothby published in 1780. In his consideration of the appearance of the book, with only the author’s name appearing on the spine, Cummings asserts that this was done on purpose by Wright (and Boothby) to signify Rousseau’s oeuvre as a whole.22 By using examples from Boothby’s own writing, he rightly points out that the aristocratic amateur had read and understood much of Rousseau’s philosophy. In fact, in Observations on the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, and on Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man (1792), Boothby developed an elaborate justification of Rousseau’s views.23 Cummings concludes that

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Wright’s portrait is a painted defense of Rousseauian thought. I believe his painting of Edwin was conceived with a similar, didactic purpose. The Minstrel was not Beattie’s only publication. A key figure in what is now known as the Scottish Enlightenment, Beattie was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and it was in this capacity that he published, in 1770, Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, a philosophical response to David Hume’s Essay on Human Nature. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of James Beattie does much to summarize visually the author’s philosophical mission. He is portrayed in his doctoral robes, holding the Essay on Truth under his arm, while the eponymous personification of Truth strikes down reifications of Skepticism, Folly, and Prejudice. These last three are said to represent Hume, his essay, and his followers, of which there were many, much to Beattie’s distress.24 Hume’s skepticism and infidelity were what Beattie thought was poisoning the minds of the British public and painting an unnecessarily grim picture of human nature. To combat this pessimism he sought to revive spiritualism and an optimistic view of human nature and of Nature in general.25 In addition, in the fourth edition (1773) of Essay on Truth, Beattie included a critical defense of Rousseau, characterizing him as a friend of man, nature, and religion.26 Sensibility of heart; a talent for extensive and accurate observation; liveliness and ardor of fancy; and a style, copious, nervous, and elegant, beyond that of any other French writer, are his [Rousseau’s] distinguishing characteristicks…. A greater number of important facts relating to the human mind are recorded in his works than in all the books of all the sceptical philosophers antient and modern. And he appears in general to be a friend to virtue, to mankind, to natural religion, and sometimes to Christianity…. Had Rousseau studied the scripture, and the writings of rational divines, with as much care, as he seems to have employed in reading the books, and listening to the conversation of French infidels, and in attending to the unchristian practices and doctrines warranted by some ecclesiastical establishments [i.e., the Jesuits]; I may venture to assure him, that his mind would have been much more at ease, his works much more valuable, and his memory much dearer to all good men…. Had he lived in an age less addicted to hypothesis, he might have distinguished himself as a moral philosopher of the first rank.27

Whether or not this is a valid interpretation of Rousseau’s philosophy matters little; the link between Rousseau and Beattie is there if for no other reason than simply because the latter thought it was. If nothing else, they were assuredly allied in their dislike of Hume.

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However, it is most certainly in his poem that Beattie fully expresses himself in a way “other than ordinary men,” as Rousseau phrases it in the first dialogue of Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques—the manuscript of which Boothby holds in his portrait.28 That his poem is semiautobiographical, like Rousseau’s late works, Beattie leaves no doubt: I find you are willing to suppose that in Edwin I have given only a picture of myself as I was in my younger days. I confess the supposition is not groundless. I have made him take pleasure in the scenes in which I took pleasure, and entertain sentiments similar to those of which, even in my early youth, I had repeated experience. The scenery of a mountainous country, the ocean, the sky, thoughtfulness and retirement, and sometimes melancholy objects and ideas, had charms in my eyes even when I was a schoolboy, and at a time when I was so far from being able to express that I did not understand my own feelings or perceive the tendency of such pursuit and amusements; and as to poetry and music, before I was ten years old I could play a little on the violin, and was as much master of Homer and Virgil as Pope’s and Dryden’s translations could make me.29

Several passages in Beattie’s didactic poem also express these themes of melancholy, intellectual contemplation of nature, and isolation. Both Wright’s Edwin and Portrait of Brooke Boothby illustrate Beattie’s verse with equal merit. For example, the poet describes young Edwin as “no vulgar boy/Deep thought oft seem’d to fix his infant eye.”30 These words seem to find correspondence in the distant, contemplative gazes of both painted subjects. “Ah! what is mirth but turbulence unholy/ When with the charm compared of heavenly melancholy?”31 Here Beattie hits upon the romantic notion of melancholy as being a higher pleasure attuned to the transcendent and sublime beauties of Nature. One finds the same romantic sentiment in the first dialogue of Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques, in which Rousseau foreshadows his discussions of botany in the second dialogue and his later Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Unlike many other Enlightenment philosophers who held a rational, almost mechanistic view of empirical reason, Rousseau believed that reason was achieved only by following one’s innate emotions rather than the arbitrary concepts of ‘civilized’ empiricism. His brand of enlightened reason could therefore be characterized as proto-romantic, with its basis in the emotional. In Book II, Edwin meets a hermit who spouts social criticism in Spenserian verse. The hermit’s diatribe, or perhaps tirade is a better word, sounds very much like Rousseau in its description of an idyllic, natural scene that is (almost) mirrored by the landscapes in Wright’s Edwin and Boothby:

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Chapter Three One cultivated spot there was, that spread Its flowery bosom to the noonday beam, Where many a rose-bud rears its blushing head, And herbs for food with future plenty teem. Sooth’d by the lulling sound of grove and stream, Romantick visions swarm on Edwin’s soul: He minded not the sun’s last trembling gleam, Nor heard from far the twilight curfew toil; When slowly on his ear these moving accents stole. ....Here Innocence may wander, safe from foes, And Contemplation soar on seraph wings. O Solitude, the man who thee foregoes, When lucre lures him, or ambition stings, Shall never know the source whence real grandeur springs.32

Beattie’s Edwin becomes the protégé of the hermit, like Boothby to Rousseau, learning how to apply his romantic propensities toward a didactic and intellectual purpose that the mentor had himself failed to accomplish: “Enraptured by the hermit’s strain, the youth/ Proceeds the path of Science to explore.” Unfortunately for Edwin, and Boothby in his turn, the application of his contemplative ideals to the real world soured the taste for what had originally inspired his thoughts: “...but Nature now/ To his experienced eye a modest grace/ Presents, where ornament the second place/ Holds, to intrinsic worth and just design/ Subservient still.” Edwin appreciates nature for its intrinsic value; he sees in plants that which cannot be seen. Rousseau preaches against this in Juge de JeanJacques and later again in the Reveries, for he valued the ‘just design’ of plants overall, much as he valued the innate emotions of natural man’s reason. The hermit’s plan had backfired. Boothby, however, was a selfproclaimed protégé who spent the end of his life in a self-imposed exile in emulation of Rousseau, dying in Boulogne in 1824, still grief stricken by the death of his beloved daughter, Penelope. In a letter of 1806 he writes from Dresden to Lord Wellesley describing himself in a Rousseauian manner recalling the Reveries: “... from indolence and penury and dejection with the prospect of public affairs, [I] have continued a solitary wanderer on the continent...”33 It seems that, both in their philosophical and autobiographical works, Rousseau and Beattie share a common romantic view of natural aesthetics. Similarly, Wright’s paintings Edwin and Boothby both clearly relate to Rousseau’s writings and share an iconography of melancholy that, seen through the filter of their literary sources, yields an iconological relationship based on the authors’ romantic appreciation of nature. Having

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read Beattie’s The Minstrel, Wright may well have seen the similarities between Boothby’s and Edwin’s dispositions and poetical inclinations. Boothby himself (and maybe even Wright)34 is sure to have read and understood the Rousseauian qualities in both Beattie’s poem and his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth. Though the Scottish author may have disagreed with Rousseau’s concept of nature with respect to theology, Paul Cantor’s arguments have shown that the Swiss philosopher’s ideas are grounded in traditional Christian teleology, and the episodes in his later work, Reveries, seem like mystical experiences of a revelatory nature.35 It is this common romantic ground that Boothby and Wright must have recognized and that they too traversed. Thus, in general, I agree with Cummings, but have demonstrated that the meaning behind Brooke Boothby is more complex than what has been previously assumed. Moreover, another connection between Rousseau and Boothby presented by Wright’s portrait is specifically related to the Linnaean system of botanical classification.36 In Britain this classification scheme was reluctantly accepted as a replacement for the cumbersome taxonomy developed by the English seventeenth-century natural historian John Ray (sometimes spelled Wray). Linnaean botany gained wider acceptance in the English-speaking world with the support of Sir Joseph Banks, who was subsequently President of the Royal Society, and his Swedish collaborator Daniel Solander, Fellow of the Royal Society. Significantly, although he would frown at the founding of the Geological (est. 1807) and Astronomical Societies (est. 1820) for fear that they might detract from the scope of the Royal Society, Banks was an enthusiastic supporter of both the Linnean Society (est. 1788) and the Horticultural Society (est. 1804).37 Among the proponents in the East Midlands of Linnaean taxonomy were Boothby and Erasmus Darwin—physician, poet, Lunar Society member, as well as patron and personal friend of Joseph Wright. Darwin and Boothby co-founded the Lichfield Botanical Society and were active in the Seward literary circle of Lichfield, members of the Derby Philosophical Society, and Fellows of the Linnean Society.38 Indeed, in a letter to Sir James Edward Smith, President of the Linnean Society, Darwin proposed Boothby and “Dr. Johnson of this Town [Derby]” for nomination to the Linnean Society.39 Johnson was Dr. William Brookes Johnson, who was also a member of the Derby Philosophical Society with Darwin and Boothby.40 Rousseau, too, was interested in botanical study. In his posthumously published Reveries of a Solitary Walker he relates autobiographical tales as promenades solitaires. Cantor argues that within the defense of

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Rousseau’s own life and work, which is more directly dealt with in his slightly earlier Juge de Jean-Jacques, we find in the Reveries a specific defense of the study of botany. Cantor has here picked up on one of the subtle Socratic inferences in the Reveries: Although like the Apology, the Reveries may be viewed as a defense of the contemplative life, the kind of contemplation Rousseau defends is very different from the kind pursued by Socrates.... [W]hat is characteristic of Rousseau’s contemplative way of life in the Reveries is that, much like a Romantic poet [Boothby?], he has turned his back on the city and turned his gaze toward physical nature.... [W]hereas Socrates turned from the study of the heavens to the study of men, Rousseau turned from the study of men to the study of plants.41

Rousseau saw botany as a retreat from the dogma of religion and the cold objectivity of science. Science was concerned with the pharmacological benefits of plants, while religion understood them in terms of the higher plan of the Creator. The philosophe wanted only to appreciate plants for their structural (sexual) aesthetics, for he believed neither religion nor science capable of defining Beauty. Of the herb gatherers and apothecaries—those people who “see in them [plants] what is not there to see,”42—and their practices, he complains in The Reveries: These medicinal ideas... spoil the glory of the fields, the glitter of the flowers, dry up the freshness of the woods, render the verdure and the shades insipid and disgusting: all these charming and gracious structures interest very little anyone who does wish to bray them in a mortar, and no one will go seeking garlands for shepherdesses among herbs for enemas.43

Rousseau had previously conveyed similar sentiments in Letters on the Elements of Botany, a copy of which was also in the library of the Derby Philosophical Society.44 This was written as a series of letters addressed to a woman, advising her on the instruction of her daughter in botanical matters, and therefore is a link between his writings on botany and education.45 Aligning himself with the British school in support of Linnaean botany, however, he proclaims Linnaeus to be a savior of sorts: “This disgusting prejudice is destroyed in part in other countries, and especially in England, thanks to Linnaeus, who has taken botany a little away from schools of pharmacy to return it to natural history....”46 The philosophe’s understanding of English botany no doubt came from a fifteen-month exile in England from 1766-67, when he first made the acquaintance of Darwin, Boothby, and presumably other figures with botanical interests. Boothby, Darwin, and Rousseau, however, embraced Linnaeus as a botanical icon for different reasons. Their different

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interpretations of Linnaean botany were related to the question of botanical purpose, and all were made visually manifest in Wright’s pictorial conception of Boothby. Because Rousseau died in 1778 and Reveries was not published until 1782, it is doubtful that Boothby had read it or any other late work (even in manuscript form) other than Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques prior to sitting for the portrait by Wright, even though the author’s recommendations in Reveries of botany as a suitable subject of study for the idle and contemplative gentleman perfectly describe the aristocrat’s demeanor.47 Therefore, one must look at the one work by Rousseau that we know Boothby possessed for any references to a similar botanical sentiment— the first dialogue of Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques. Indeed, there are several passages in the first dialogue in which the author makes reference to the appreciation of Nature generally, if not yet to botany specifically. The descriptions of an ideal world and its inhabitants’ distinctive sensibilities and sensitivities immediately conjure up Brooke Boothby. Of this ideal landscape and its effect on its inhabitants, Rousseau’s semiautobiographical character ‘Rousseau’ says: Forms are more elegant, colors more vivid, odors sweeter, all objects more interesting. All nature is so beautiful there that its contemplation, inflaming souls with love for such a touching tableau, inspires in them both the desire to contribute to this beautiful system and the fear of troubling its harmony; and from this comes an exquisite sensitivity which gives those endowed with it immediate enjoyment unknown to hearts that the same contemplations have not aroused.48

The words ‘contemplation’ and ‘exquisite sensitivity’ foreshadow Rousseau’s defense of botany in both his second dialogue and the Reveries. The words ‘contribute’ and ‘system’ having been used in the same sentence may be a subtle reference to the ever-growing Linnaean system of classification, the value of which was that newly discovered species of plants could be quickly named and classified, contributing to the overall understanding of botany. A botanist, therefore, possesses this exquisite sensitivity that allows him/her to contemplate nature and fills him/her with the desire to collect, study, and discover new species of plants, thereby contributing to the Linnaean system. The enjoyment felt by such a person in this process is unknown to the people who collect for the purpose of pharmacology, according to Rousseau. It may be said that Boothby, an amateur botanist prone to fatigue, ennui, and bouts of melancholy, experienced the higher, ideal enjoyment of nature of which the philosophe writes. In fact, the author goes on to describe the

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personalities and habits of these ideal inhabitants in a manner that seems also to fit Boothby’s own: Finally, if they are not more virtuous than people are here, they are at least less ill-disposed toward others if only because they know better how to love themselves. They are also less active, or to state it better, less restless. Their efforts to get the object they contemplate consist in vigorous thrusts, but as soon as they feel their impotence, they stop without looking within reach for equivalents of that unique object which is the only thing that can tempt them. Since they do not seek their happiness in appearances but rather in intimate feelings, they expend little energy trying to move from the rank in which fortune has placed them.49

Boothby often contemplated such things as nature in the manner Rousseau prescribes in his writings. Idle contemplation often leads to melancholic associations, as Rousseau himself admits, and may partly account for Wright’s appropriation, perhaps at Boothby’s suggestion, of the melancholic iconography from Elizabethan portraiture. Beings who are so uniquely constituted must necessarily express themselves in other ways than ordinary men.... [T]he expression of their feelings and ideas [are] the stamp of those modifications. If this stamp is not noticed by those who have no notion of that manner of being [i.e., melancholy], it cannot escape the notice of those who know it and are themselves affected by it.50

Significantly, ‘Rousseau’ outlines the reasons why he enjoys and defends the writings of the fictive author, ‘Jean-Jacques’, the other semiautobiographical character: I never adopted the philosophy of the happy people of the age; it does not suit me. I sought one more appropriate for my heart, more consoling in adversity, more encouraging to virtue. I found it in the books of J.J. I drew from them feelings compatible with the ones natural to me, I felt they had so much relationship to my own dispositions, that alone among all the authors I have read, he was for me the portrayer of nature and the historian of the human heart. I recognized in his writings the man I found in myself, and meditating on them taught me to find within myself the enjoyment and happiness that all others seek so far from themselves.51

It would seem that Boothby and ‘Rousseau’ had much in common. The Englishman knew Rousseau primarily through his writings, in which he found a kindred spirit. Similarly, ‘Rousseau’ knew of ‘J-J’ only by having read his work. One may picture Boothby meditating on Rousseau’s writings, recognizing in them the man he found in himself, and learning to

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find within, among the unique and individual beauties of nature, ‘the enjoyment and happiness that all others seek so far from themselves.’ Is this not what Boothby is doing in Wright’s portrait of him? At first glance, it seems as simple as that. It appears that Boothby is indeed lost in his appreciation of the beauty of Nature, which appeals to his botanical sensibilities, the likes of which were enumerated by Rousseau; however, after prolonged inspection, one cannot escape the feeling that Boothby, stretched out among raw Nature, looks about as comfortable as if he were lying on a bed of nails. The stiffness of his figure, the awkwardness of his pose, and the fact that his pale-gray clothing, shoes and wide-brim hat are the height of elegant fashion, all serve to highlight his discomfort as he reclines on the muddy bank of a brook—pun intended.52 Indeed, one must also ask what kind of a Rousseauian man of nature wears dogskin gloves—an artificial barrier from natural elements—outdoors on a temperate autumn day? This is quite different from Rousseau’s idyllic people of nature, who “do not seek their happiness in appearances.”53 Wright’s depiction of Boothby in this manner makes a sharp contrast with his earlier portrait of Thomas Day, a much more eccentric follower of Rousseau known for his purposely unkempt appearance and intentionally boorish manners. Day is portrayed standing in full length against a classical column, holding a worn volume of some kind—probably a wellthumbed copy of Rousseau’s Emile, the one book other than the Bible that he claimed to value most. He is dressed unflatteringly in rather rumpled Van Dyck dress, which emphasizes his portliness and poor posture, while his hair is similarly disheveled and unpowdered. He wears neither hat nor gloves. Although in reality a gentleman by birth and means, and despite the usual identification of Van Dyck attire with ‘fancy dress’ occasions, Day appears as a seventeenth-century peasant who has just wandered out of the forest, where he had been gathering firewood for his rustic cottage, in order to stand before Wright (and us). Through an ironically careful cultivation of unrefinement, Day attempted to make himself into the British exemplum virtutis of Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ by consciously rejecting modern society and its artificial conventions, and he was proud of it. Conversely, Boothby’s aristocratic status gave him a social suavity and dandified persona that was cultivated further by his cultural education and extensive travels. He was perhaps more like Rousseau the man, than ‘Rousseau’ the character, after all. He could mix easily among the highest ranks of society. This was probably one reason why it was he who visited Sir Joseph Banks in person at the Royal Society for guidance and approval

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of the Lichfield Botanical Society’s translation of Linnaeus’s works. Unlike Darwin, Boothby was more-or-less the social and cultural equal of Banks, who was the heir of landed gentry. Darwin, who had a considerable stammer, came across better on paper and took the liberty of corresponding with Banks about Boothby’s visit and the Lichfield Society’s decision to dedicate their translation to the President of the Royal Society.54 The doctor, traveling often to see patients, may also have been too busy to meet with Banks personally, while Boothby, much more a man of leisure, had sufficient time. One should keep in mind that neither Rousseau nor Boothby were men of science per se. The latter’s enduring sense of fashion as he lies on the ground corresponds to the former’s telling statement about why he prefers the Linnaean system: “because it is most complete, and most in fashion.”55 While Darwin, as evidenced by his poetical personification of the botanical world, could undoubtedly relate to their understanding of botany as a vehicle for the genteel appreciation of the beauty of Nature, his medical background and polymathic scientific interests encouraged him to see Linnaeus in an economic light, as Banks and King George III had done by conceiving and organizing the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew as a Linnaean laboratory for horticultural and agricultural experimentation.56 Due to his privileged background, however, many perceived Banks to be a precocious dilettante. He and his protégé Daniel Solander, FRS, were often the subject of satirical caricatures ridiculing Banks’s elite status, Solander’s perceived role as the token Swedish sycophant, and their ‘foppish’ adventures in science.57 These images were part of a visual repertoire commonly referred to as ‘macaroni’ prints because they frequently targeted those elements of British society with the means to have embarked on the Grand Tour of Italy, critiquing their subsequent adoption and affectation of Continental manners, from fashion and language to moral depravity and ‘popery’. Such prints are often useful in understanding eighteenth-century fashion trends for both men and women, particularly short-lived fads that have otherwise escaped mainstream visual art. The wide-brimmed hat Boothby wears in his portrait, known as a “wide-awake,” was one such item of men’s fashion satirized in this way. A Mushroom Frogstool and Puff—Here To-day and Gone Tomorrow, a print in the collection of the British Museum, is dated 1780 and pokes fun at the vogue for such large, ostentatious hats among fops and boors alike in their pursuit of fashionable gentility [Fig. 3-3].58 It depicts three men with ridiculously large wide-awakes, one of whom also holds a large mushroom-shaped parasol. The central figure also sports an exaggeratedly

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Fig. 3-3. A Mushroom Frogstool and Puff: Here To-Day and Gone To-Morrow (c. 1780). Engraving. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London.

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oversized, bow-tied cravat, much like the one Boothby wears. The date of the image coincides with that of Wright’s painting, proving that although Boothby’s attire was perhaps not haute couture, it was certainly à la mode and no doubt expensive—not the sort of thing one ordinarily wears to lay about in the woods. Costume historian Aileen Ribeiro describes Boothby’s appearance as reflecting a “spirit of modernity,” writing that although the pose may have been influenced by images of Elizabethan melancholics, the costume is certainly not indicative of a melancholic déshabillé, but a definite statement of high fashion. Boothby wears a light-brown cloth frock-suit; both coat and waistcoat are double-breasted, and the latter is cut fashionably short across the waist, allowing the long slim breeches to be seen. So slim-fitting is the coat that it no longer covers the thighs, and the sleeves are so modishly tight that they have to be unbuttoned at the wrist to aid movement of the arm.59

The reserved English fashion sense allowed men of means to distinguish themselves primarily through “the fineness of the shirt and stockings, a good hat and the best shoes.”60 I believe the visual conception of Boothby in overly fashionable clothes that had recently been the subject of popular satire, reclining in an unusual manner—although not unprecedented—serves to highlight the sitter as the corporeal embodiment of botanical study as leisure activity. As I have already indicated, the study of plants was a pursuit advocated by Rousseau for the contemplative man of leisure, and its value lay in the pleasure given to those with a special kind of sensitivity. In Rousseau’s scheme, botanical pleasure stands in opposition to the study of plants for pharmacological purposes, that is, to its medicinal utility. At the same time, however, Boothby’s natural surroundings remind us not only of the medical, but also the economic utility of botany as a science. The accumulation and cultivation of medically useful flora would theoretically further the goal of national self-sufficiency.61 In fact, the plants depicted at Boothby’s head and feet were known in the eighteenth century to be of medicinal value. Besides a few inconspicuous blades of tall grass, there are also water lilies (Nymphaea alba) [Fig. 3-4] at Boothby’s feet, ivy (Hedera helix) and kidneywort (Cotyledon umbilicus) [Fig. 3-5] under his right arm, and more ivy, pilewort (Ranunculus ficaria) [Fig. 3-6] and sweet violet (Viola odorata) [Plate 3-2] at the base of the group of trees in the middleground. The pharmaceutical function of these plants adds to the humour of the painting when one considers Rousseau’s words: “…no one will go seeking garlands for shepherdesses among herbs for enemas.”

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Fig. 3-4. (left) Water Lily (Nymphaea alba). Courtesy of W. Foulsham and Co., Ltd. Fig. 3-5. (middle) Kidneywort (Cotyledon umbilicus). Courtesy of W. Foulsham and Co., Ltd. Fig. 3-6. (right) Pilewort, or Celandine Minor (Ranunculus ficaria). Courtesy of W. Foulsham and Co., Ltd.

The seed and root of water lilies were used to settle the stomach in an effort to normalize the humours. Ivy and kidneywort were both used since the seventeenth century to soothe external ulcerations, dissolve kidney stones, and induce urination and menstruation. Kidneywort, like pilewort, was applied externally to soothe the piles (hemorrhoids), and taken internally to remedy inflammations of the stomach, liver, and bowels. John Edwards (1775) writes that common pilewort grows wildly along ditch banks and other moist places throughout England, and A New Royal and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1770) goes further, saying that it is …perennial, flowers in April, and grows wild in hedges and moist meadows. The leaves of this plant are reckoned antiscorbutic, and the roots are by some said to be a specific against the piles....62

Moreover, William Woodville writes of the sweet violet: …the leaves are heart-shaped, veined, crenated, or slightly scaloped [sic.] at the edges, on the upper side smooth, and of a shining green colour, underneath paler, somewhat hairy…. It is common near warm hedges, and on ditch banks, and flowers in March and April. This species of violet may be distinguished from the Viola hirta, to which it bears a great resemblance, by the latter having its leaves and footstalks beset with small hairs; [and] not sending off creeping shoots which strike root…. The recent flowers only are now received in the catalogues of the Materia Medica [a dictionary of medicinal plants]; they have an agreeable sweet

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The plants are all either laxative agents or used in the treatment of hemorrhoids. It is especially contextually significant in relation to the painting’s iconological meaning to understand that the eighteenth-century treatment of melancholy often involved the use of such medicines. Cummings has already demonstrated how Boothby’s pose signifies him as a melancholic intellectual by comparing its similarity to Elizabethan portrait iconography. In addition, I have demonstrated how Boothby’s similarity to Edwin underscores the theme of melancholy common to each painting. It was a widely held medical belief that the ‘active qualities’ of bile affected the senses.64 The functions of the liver, bladder, stomach, and intestines were believed to have a bearing on the ‘humours,’ or personality traits and behavior. Melancholy resulted from a superfluity of bodily fluids that would normally be expelled. Vomitive and other purgative remedies were often prescribed not only because they: empty the Stomach and its Appendages, and carry off their noxious Crudities; but likewise by a strong Concussion, they compel the Glands of the Stomach, the Intestines, and other Organs in the Abdomen to discharge the peccant juices that harbour there; and by this means open and unlock their Obstructions…. [They also] agitate the Spirits… and by that means occasion Diversity of Ideas, and strike out other Roads and ways of Thinking.65

Anti-inflammatory medicaments were, subsequently, recommended to soothe and to reduce hemorrhoidal swelling and irritation caused by intestinal purgation. Such botanical irony may be the result of Darwin’s influence on the painter. Although the doctor celebrated plants by anthropomorphizing them in an epic poem, one must not forget it was the medical function of botany that initially sparked his interest. Darwin kept extensive medical journals, recording his patients’ ailments, treatments, and progress. In later life he used these notes and a lifetime of observation and experience to write his two-volume magnum opus, Zoonomia (1794-96), in which, among other things, he attempted to formulate a taxonomy of human diseases along Linnaean lines. In the

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section on hemorrhages, Darwin states his belief that hemorrhoids are symptoms of hepatic obstruction—the cause of melancholy: The other kind of haemorrhage is known from its being attended with a weak pulse, and other symptoms of general debility, and very frequently occurs in those, who have diseased livers, owing to intemperance in the use of fermented liquors. These constitutions are shewn to be liable to paralysis of the lymphatic absorbents, producing the various kinds of dropsies in Section XXIX.5. Now if any branch of the venous system loses its power of absorption, the part swells, and at length bursts and discharges the blood, which the capillaries or other glands circulate through them. It sometimes happens that the large external veins of the legs burst, and effuse their blood; but this occurs most frequently in the veins of the intestines, as the vena portarum [sic.] is liable to suffer from a schirrus [sic.] of the liver opposing the progression of the blood, which is absorbed from the intestines. Hence the piles are a symptom of hepatic obstruction, and hence the copious discharges downwards or upwards of a black material, which has been called melancholia, or black bile; but is no other than the blood, which is probably discharged from the veins of the intestines.66

Thus, hepatic obstruction is caused by the inflammation of the liver. To relieve this Darwin prescribes “copious and repeated venesection… early in the disease, with repeated doses of calomel, and cathartics.”67 Thus, along with bleeding, Darwin used botanical cathartics, including perhaps Viola odorata, to relieve the hepatic inflammation that caused both melancholy and piles. It is deeply curious that there is no classification of melancholy as a disease in Zoonomia; however, there is an entry for Taedium vitae, or ennui, which Darwin describes as the “Irkesomeness of Life.” For this malady he prescribed a non-medicinal treatment that would still be considered efficacious: physical activity. The pain of laziness has been thought by some philosophers to be that principle of action, which has excited all our industry, and distinguished mankind from the brutes of the field. It is certain that, where ennui exists, it is relieved by the exertions of our minds or bodies, as all other painful sensations are relieved; but it depends much upon our early habits, whether we become patient of laziness, or inclined to activity, during the remainder of our lives, as other animals do not appear to be affected with this malady; which is perhaps less owing to deficiency of pleasurable sensation, than to the superabundancy of voluntary power, which occasions pain in the muscles by its accumulation; as appears from the perpetual motions of a squirrel confined in a cage.68

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Darwin even treated Wright for several chronic ailments, including rheumatic fevers, asthma, headaches, blurred vision, dropsy, and, in later years, liver dysfunction. Many of these ailments were possibly hypochondriacal or at least psychosomatic; Wright’s contemporaries seem to have gossiped about Darwin’s role in manipulating the health concerns (fears) of his patient.69 But modern scholars often broadly attribute the frequently occurring maladies to depression. Indeed, to relieve his irksome malaise, the physician encouraged Wright to take vigorous walks and it is believed by many that the artist’s journey to the Lake District was part of his treatment. But such jaunts could also be made closer to home: Wright explains the delay in his reply to Wedgwood in a letter dated July 15, 1779 by saying he had been away “on a ramble for my health” and had he received Wedgwood’s letter prior to leaving, he would have visited the potter at Etruria along the way.70 It is also plausible that Boothby’s remote location was not too far from the sitter’s home and may indicate that he received a similar prescription. In his description of Hepatitis chronica, or chronic inflammation of the liver, Darwin says that there may be no external signs of disease; i.e., no eruptions of “black bile.” He attributes this phenomenon to the insensibility of the internal parts of this viscus; which has thus neither been attended with pain, nor induced any fever; yet there may be in some cases reason to suspect the existence of such an abscess; either from a sense of fullness in the right hypochondre, or from transient pains sometimes felt there, or from pain on [of] pressure, or from lying on the left side, and sometimes from a degree of sensitive fever attending it.71

In light of this information, it is very interesting to note that Boothby lies on his right side. Might Boothby have suffered from chronic hepatitis? If so, his pose encodes a deeper medical diagnosis than mere melancholy, which is decoded when one considers the plants depicted and Darwin’s words in Zoonomia. Unfortunately, there is no solid evidence to corroborate this diagnosis, which must remain speculation until something else is discovered. However, Darwin’s observations about melancholia and the piles, and their correlation to hepatic inflammation and its treatment are cogent facts that support my hypothesis about the plants seen in Boothby’s portrait. In a sense the doctor is also in the painting. He is not physically visible, but is assuredly there in spirit. The juxtaposition of an amateur botanist (Boothby), his volume of Rousseau, and his medically significant surroundings visually displays the tension between the two schools of botanical inquiry that shared a common taxonomic scheme. The visible

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flora serve collectively not only as a medical foil to botanical pleasure, but also as an additional reference to the fact we are in the presence of a melancholic intellectual who may be in need of their medicinal application, supporting the idea that the pose is related to the Elizabethan and other iconographic precedents already discussed. Wright’s Portrait of Brooke Boothby outwardly depicts its subject as both ‘Rousseau’ with the writings of ‘Jean-Jacques,’ and as Edwin, with the hermit being analogically represented by Rousseau’s manuscript. It also visually connects Boothby and Rousseau on philosophical and botanical grounds. At the same time, however, it seems ironically to visualize the tension between botanical pleasure and utility. Wright chose cleverly to depict Boothby with a subtle irony that highlights the sitter’s position in the middle of the two botanical camps—between Darwin and Rousseau, utility and pleasure. Uneasily stretched among his natural surroundings, the aristocrat is fashionably dressed, seeking literary—if not literal—garlands for shepherdesses among herbs for enemas and other medicaments for treating unpleasant afflictions. The painting, therefore, is as eclectic as Wright the individual and his circle of friends, related as it is not only to botany, medicine and continental philosophy, but also to contemporary British popular culture, literature and moral philosophy.

Notes 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques: Premier Dialogue, ed. Brooke Boothby (Lichfield: J. Johnson, 1780). 2 Frederick Cummings, “Boothby, Rousseau, and the Romantic Malady,” Burlington Magazine (Dec. 1968): 659-67. 3 My theoretical terminology comes from Erwin Panofsky’s three levels of interpretation discussed in his Studies in Iconology (1939) and reprinted in the first chapter of Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). 4 For studies of the Physiocratic function of botany, see Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Lisbet Koerner, “Carl Linnaeus in His Time and Place,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J.A. Secord, and E.C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 145-62; Emma Spary, “Political, Natural, and Bodily Economies,” in Cultures of Natural History, 17896; and Gascoigne, Joseph Banks. 5 Egerton, Wright of Derby. 6 Ibid., 116. 7 Nicolson, Joseph Wright, 126-27. 8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, eds. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris, 1959): 983. “I said to myself: Behold the courier that Providence

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has chosen for me…. Unfortunately, my new copy [i.e., of Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques] was not yet finished, but I was eager to give him that which was done, giving him the rest should he return the following year, if, as I would not doubt, the love of truth gives him the zeal to return in search of it.” 9 Nicolson, 126-128. 10 Ibid., 127. 11 Cummings, op. cit. 12 Ibid., 660. 13 See also Peter Klaus Schuster, “Moral und Psychologie; zu einem Interpretationswandel ikonographischer Typen in der Kunst seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (1980): 115-31. 14 Isaac Oliver is known to have traveled to Venice in 1596, where he may have seen the late medieval Venetian manuscript, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, in which there are woodcuts illustrating Poliphilo’s story. In the section that deals with his dream state, Poliphilo is shown reclining in a landscape very similar to Oliver’s and Wright’s. The text, which by 1596 had been translated into French and that was certainly comprehensible to Oliver, the son of an exiled Huguenot, describes Poliphilo as a melancholic. Dr. April Oettinger kindly informed me that the Hypnerotomachia had been published in English in 1592, complete with the original woodcuts. See also Ursula Hoff, “Meditation in Solitude,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1937-38, reprinted 1970): 292-94, for more information on the iconography of melancholic contemplation. 15 British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, #1939-8-14-1 (36), recto. 16 In 1781, Wright painted a companion piece to Edwin entitled Maria, from Sterne that relates to Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). The artist had painted an earlier version in 1777 of Maria and also The Captive after Sterne’s book. Significantly, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey is discussed by Eric Miller in “The Insufficiency, Success, and Significance of Natural History,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 (Summer 1995): 51934. Further research about these Sterne-based paintings needs to be undertaken, particularly in relation to melancholy and natural history. 17 Egerton, 113. 18 See Cummings’ comparison of Boothby’s dress with that of Isaac Oliver’s Edward Herbert, 660. 19 Wright’s practical medical knowledge is also evidenced in a letter he wrote to his brother from Rome dated 10 August 1774 (See Barker, 81-82, letter 17): “At 7 o’clock on the morning of St. John, Mrs. Wright was safely delivered of a very fine girl. She had a good time but has been much indisposed since, with a gathered Breast & Dysentery wch. have much abataed her strength. The former complaint I treated as Buchan orders & with good successs. The constant application of poultice brought on a plentiful supperation & continued it I suppose till the matter was drawn off & then it healed. This seem’d to me a natural mode of cure & so I followed it. For the Dysentery, as it is a Complaint people are very liable to have I called in a Doctor, but they are such Nostrum=mongers & dealers in deceit I have no opinion of them. It is said of them that they neither cure nor kill so many as

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these English, & I believe it is true.” Collection of the Derby Local Studies Library. 20 D. H. Weinglass, ed. Collected Letters of William Roscoe (vol 1, 1950), 190, n.2. 21 James Beattie, The Minstrel: or the Progress of Genius (Edinburgh, 1774), book II, stanza XXIX. The inscription appears without the bracketed words in Wright’s Edwin. 22 Ibid., 665. “The word written on the spine of the book held by Boothby is simply ‘Rousseau,’ and the emblematic character of the portrait makes us ask if this is not also an emblem. Is Boothby holding the volume printed the year before in Lichfield and thus commemorating his publication of the first dialogue of Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques, or is he, in addition, suggesting a meaning beyond that?” 23 Many of the Midlands intellectual elite and their circle of social acquaintances were enthusiasts of Rousseau’s ideology. Wright’s own Rousseauian views on childcare, for example, are made apparent in his letter from Rome dated August 14, 1774: “Our mode of dressing it [his infant daughter, Hannah Romana] is so different to the Italian it raises their Admiration, for instead of the loose light and easy dress we have, they swaddle their children from head to foot, like so many Egyptian Mummies….” See Hannah Wright, “Life of Joseph Wright,” (Derby Local Studies Library), 49, published in Barker, 158-177. Hannah was Wright’s niece. 24 Two of the figures also physically resemble Hume and Voltaire, adding to their negative valuing in the image. 25 Margaret Forbes, Beattie and His Friends (Bristol, 1904; reprinted 1990), 40-53. 26 Ibid., 70. 27 James Beattie, Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (London, 1773, 4th ed.): 437-440, continuous footnote. 28 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, eds. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: 1990), 12. 29 Beattie in a letter to the Dowager Lady Forbes, quoted in Forbes, 55. 30 Beattie, Minstrel, book I, stanza xvi. 31 Ibid., book I, stanza lv. 32 Ibid., book II, stanzas ix and x. 33 Boothby, quoted in Cummings, 666, n. 39. 34 Wright was at least familiar with Rousseauian ideas concerning child-rearing, which may have come second hand from Darwin. The painter’s children were often to be found running precariously among his studio. Farington writes of the artist’s notorious parental laxity, “Dr. Darwin makes it a rule never to contradict his children, but to leave them entirely their own masters—Wright silently imitates Darwin in this respect.” (Farington, vol. III, 679, entry for Thursday, 20 October 1796.) Wright’s own criticism of the Italian manner of dressing infants indicates a similar idea: “our mode of Dressing it [the baby] is so different to the Italian it raises their Admiration for instead of the loose light & easy Dress we have, they swattle their Children from head to foot like so many Egyptian Mummies.”

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(Wright to his sister Nancy, 14 August 1774. Collection of the Derby Local Studies Library. See also Barker, 82-83, letter 18.) 35 Paul Cantor, “The Metaphysics of Botany,” Southwest Review (Summer 1985): 362-380. 36 The Linnaean system of botanical classification as it relates to the theory of plant sexuality was developed by the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, a.k.a. Linnaeus. See Gascoigne, Joseph Banks, 57-118; Pascal Duris, Linné et la France (17801850)(Geneva, 1993); Norah Gourle, The Prince of Botanists: Carl Linnaeus (London, 1953); Allan Ellenius, The Natural Sciences and the Arts: Aspects of Interaction from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, An International Symposium (Stockholm, 1985), pp. 32-45, 84-97, 133-146; and Albert Alberg, The Floral King: A Life of Linnaeus (London, 1888). 37 Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government, 138. N.B.: the Linnean Society maintains the spelling of its name based on the eighteenth-century spelling of ‘Linneus’, which is today usually spelled ‘Linnaeus’. This accounts for my alternating between ‘Linnean’ and ‘Linnaean’. 38 Nicolson, Joseph Wright, 127: “His [Boothby’s] letter to Rousseau [of Feb. 24, 1768] had revealed his interest in botany..., and together with Darwin he founded the Lichfield Botanic [sic.] Society.” Also Schofield, Lunar Society, 307: “Darwin organized the ‘Botanical Society of Lichfield’, comprising himself, a local dilettante, Sir Brooks [sic.] Boothby, and a proctor of Lichfield Cathedral, Rev. Joseph Jackson. This society set about to produce a translation of the Genera and Species Plantarum of Linnaeus....” See further, Gascoigne, Joseph Banks, 105: “Appropriately, Banks was the dedicatee of a new English translation of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum, undertaken by Erasmus Darwin and the members of ‘a botanical society at Lichfield’ in 1781, one of the aims of which was ‘to induce ladies and other unemploy’d scholars to study Botany’. (Consequently Darwin declared that ‘The greatest care shall be observed to avoid any ridiculous terms, particularly in those bordering on obscenity’.)” 39 Desmond King-Hele, ed. The Letters of Erasmus Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 224. The letter is dated September 12, 1792. According to their nomination papers in the collection of the Linnean Society, Darwin was elected on November 20 of that year, Boothby January 15, 1793. Samuel Goodenough and Jonas Dryander officially proposed each for election. John Sibthorp also supported Boothby. Goodenough was a founding member of the LS and its first Treasurer, Dryander was Vice-President and Librarian, while Sibthorp was the well-traveled Oxford professor of botany whose “aim was to investigate the medicinal plants recorded by the ancient Greek herbalist, Dioscorides, in the region where [he]… had known them, and thus make the herblore of ancient Greece available to modern medicine” via his Flora Graeca, published posthumously. See Margot Walker, Sir James Edward Smith, 1759-1828 (London: Linnean Society, 1988): 9, 17, 31-33 for Sibthorp, and A.T. Gage and W.T. Stearn, A Bicentenary History of the Linnean Society of London (London: Academic Press for the Linnean Society of London, 1988): 6-16, 27-34 for Goodenough, and 15-19, 23-25 for Dryander.

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40 William Brookes Johnson may also be the ‘William Brooks’ in Wright’s “Account Book,” the artist having painted his portrait circa 1760. The picture was sold at Christie’s in the late 1980s as Mr. William Brookes, and it is associated with Wright’s portraits of Dr. Pigot and his wife from the same time. Significantly, Pigot and Johnson both later became members of the Derby Philosophical Society. For information on the DPS, see Derby Philosophical Society Library, Rules and Catalogue and Idem., Catalogue of the Library; Sturges, “The Membership of the Derby Philosophical Society,” 212-229; Robinson, “The Derby Philosophical Society,” 359-367; and Sturges, “Cultural Life in Derby,” chapter 6. 41 Cantor, 364-65. 42 Rousseau, The Reveries of a Solitary [Walker], trans. John Gould Fletcher (New York, 1927; reprinted 1971), 140. 43 Ibid., 141. My italics. 44 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letters on the Elements of Botany, Addressed to a Lady, Translated into English, with Notes, and Twenty-Four Additional Letters, Fully Explaining the System of Linnaeus, Translated by Thomas Martyn, BD, Professor of Botany in the University of Cambridge (London: B. White and Son, 1785). It is likely this was the version in the DPS collection because it is listed in the library catalogue simply as ‘Rousseau’s Letters on the Elements of Botany’, and is not included among the foreign publications. Moreover, in the preface to the Lichfield Botanical Society’s translation of Linnaeus’s Genera Plantarum, Darwin acknowledges the assistance of Professor Martyn of Cambridge. 45 “The principal misfortune of Botany is, that from its very birth it has been looked upon merely as a part of medicine…. This false idea of Botany, for a long time, almost confined the study of it to medicinal plants, and reduced the vegetable chain to a small number of interrupted links. Even these were very ill studied, because the substance only was attended to, and not the organization. How indeed could they be much interested in the organical structure of a substance, of which they had no other idea but as a thing to be pounded in a mortar?” (Rousseau, Elements of Botany, 1) Rousseau reiterates the idea that botany is not a science of words and memorization; it cannot be learned from books, but only from Nature and, by implication, experience. (Ibid., 35-36, 51-52) “I can never repeat it often enough, teach them [children] not to pay themselves in words, nor to think they know any thing of what is merely laid up in their memory.” (Ibid., 52) 46 Idem., Reveries, 140. 47 Idem., Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues. In the second dialogue, ‘Rousseau’ says of botany: “I understand that the charm of studying nature is something for all sensitive souls, and a great deal for a solitary person.” (134) Rousseau later writes in the Reveries: “The more a contemplator has a sensitive soul, the more he yields himself to ecstasies which excite in him this harmony.” (138) 48 Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, 9. Italics are my own. 49 Ibid., 11. 50 Ibid., 12. 51 Ibid., 52-53.

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52 Michael Rosenthal, who briefly discusses Boothby in terms of ‘effeminacy’ and ‘sensiblity’, points out that there exists a clever visual/verbal pun within the painting: Brooke Boothby reclines by a brook, the French word for which is ruisseau, which sounds like Rousseau, the name appearing on the spine of the book held by Boothby. See Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: ‘a little business for the Eye’ (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1999), 242-44. 53 Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, 11. York tan gloves were the height of men’s fashion in 1780, but dogskin gloves were also very fashionable and more apropos for country wear. See C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Eighteenth Century (London: Faber and Faber, no date), 261. 54 King-Hele, Letters, 116-17. The letter, one of several from Darwin to Banks, is dated October 24, 1781 and reads: “…. Mr Boothby writes me word, he has had the pleasure of waiting upon you—and has favour’d me with some remarks you made on a poem, in which I have written several of the notes, and corrected some of the verse, a part of which was written by Miss [Anna] Seward, and a part by Mr [William] Sayle. The history you mentioned to Mr Boothby of the Tremella is truly curious: yet I have certainly seen parts of fungi, particularly growing on an old rail, turned to a white gelatinous substance, as I supposed by the frost. I shall beg leave to add your account of it in the note, if it be agreeable to you: otherwise not. The other circumstances that Mr Boothby informs me you criticised, I shall endeavour to have altered—the design of the poem was to induce ladies and other unemploy’d scholars to study Botany, by putting many of the agreeable botanical facts into the notes.” King-Hele comments in Note 5: “This letter shows Brooke Boothby making a contribution to the project by discussing it personally with Banks….” 55 Rousseau, Elements of Botany, 91. My italics. 56 Even in The Botanic Garden, Darwin’s poetical epic tribute to Nature generally, and to Linnaean sexual botany particularly, the doctor included copious explanatory footnotes to make the poem’s ‘art’ a useful ‘science’—medicinally and economically. See notes 4 and 34 for references to publications that deal with Banks’s role viz. the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. 57 For example, The Simpling Macaroni (published by M. Darly, July 13, 1772), the caption of which reads, “Like Soland-goose from frozen zone I wander,/On shallow Bank’s grow’s [sic.] fat Sol*****.” Solander is shown full-length in profile, holding a botanical specimen and a collecting knife. British Museum, Prints and Drawings, #4696. 58 British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, # 5793. The reference to ‘frogstool’ in the title may be a slur on the French origin of these and many other contemporary fashion trends. 59 Ribeiro, The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750 to 1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 48. See also Ibid., A Visual History of Costume: The Eighteenth Century (London: Batsford, 1983), 107, and Ibid., Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715-1789 (London: B.T. Batsford, Ltd., 1984), 143-46.

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60 J.W. Archenholz, A Picture of England, Containing a Description of the Laws, Customs and Manners of England, 2 vols, London, 1789), vol. 2, 114-115. Boothby wears shoes with fashionable artois buckles embellished with decorative fluting at a time when the usual attire for country outings called for riding boots. N.B.: The fact that Wright’s bust-length self-portrait of 1780 (Yale Center for British Art Paul Mellon Collection) shows the artist in a similar round hat and frock coat does not detract from its modishness, but instead further supports my arguments about Wright’s socioeconomic status as a “private gentleman” of means. 61 Linnaeus’s mission was to use botanical knowledge for the achievement of Physiocratic self-sufficiency in Sweden. Taking a political cue from the Crown, an economic one from Linnaeus, and a scientific one from the Royal Society, Banks oversaw the creation of the Royal Gardens at Kew for a similar Physiocratic purpose. 62 John Edwards [botanist, fl. 1768-1795], A Select Collection of One Hundred Plates; Consisting of the Most Beautiful Exotic and British Flowers… with their Botanic Characters, and A Short Account of the Cultivation, Their Uses in Medicine (London: S. Hooper, 1775), 5, plate X, and M. Hinde, W. Squire, T. Marshall, and Thomas Cooke, A New Royal and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: or, Complete System of Human Knowledge (London: J. Cooke, 1770, 2 vols.), volume I, entry for “Celandine,” a synonym for Pilewort. 63 Woodville, volume II, 225-227. Furthermore, he tells us that the plant was known to Theophrastus and Dioscorides, it was used by Arabian physicians to treat inflammatory diseases, and “Dr. [William] Withering [a member of the Lunar Society] tells us, that at Stratford-upon-Avon large quantities of the Violet are cultivated for this [purgative] purpose.” (227, note f) See also Tournefort, Materia Medica; or A Description of Simple Medicines Generally Us’d in Physick (London: Andrew Bell, 1716), 385: “Of Violets.... The Leaves of Violets are us’d in Glisters; for they purge gently, and loosen the Belly.” 64 James Maclung, Experiments Upon the Human Bile (London: T. Cadell, 1772), 1: “The Bile is so distinguished among the animal fluids by its active qualities with regard to the senses….” 65 Sir Richard Blackmore, Kt., MD, FRCP, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: or, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections with Three Discourses on the Nature and Cure of the Cholick, Melancholy, and Palsies (London: J. Pemberton, 1725), 167. 66 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (London: J. Johnson, 1794 (I), 1796 (II)): vol. 1, section XXVII.2, pp. 292-3. 67 Ibid., vol. 2, Class II.1.2.12, pp. 203-204. 68 Ibid., vol. 2, Class II.2.1.2, p. 307. 69 Farington, vol. III, 679: “[John] Lee Philips told me that Dr Darwin of Derby has regulated the life of Wright in whatever relates to health for some years past, and has contributed to make Wright more Valetudinary and unhappy—by encreasing [sic.] his apprehension. Wright has lived in a state of Terror of consequences

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which might arise from the most trifling deviations from rule. At present Darwin says Wright’s Liver is gone.” 70 Wedgwood Archive, 669-1. 71 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 2, Class II.1.4.12, p. 265. My italics.

CHAPTER FOUR SYMPATHY AND SENTIMENT

Joseph Wright took much of his artistic inspiration from the various currents of natural philosophical thought coursing through his native East Midlands. The preceding chapters discussed how geological theories and natural and human histories contributed to the painter’s choices of Derbyshire landscape scenery, while economically useful pursuits, such as mining, manufacture and botany, figured into several portraits of local patrons. These branches of natural philosophy were also important topics of study and discussion among the would-be members of the Derby Philosophical Society, many of whom were the artist’s personal friends and patrons.1 The group’s library would eventually include a vast array of books on these philosophical subjects by both British and Continental authors.2 Not only was natural philosophy of interest, however; moral philosophy seems to have provided the group with a social and ethical compass. Moreover, its library and membership indicate that the Scottish Enlightenment was their major source for such material. Many of Wright’s paintings show that he was likewise well aware of such moral philosophical concepts as ‘sympathy’ and ‘sensibility’. This chapter explores two distinct avenues by which the artist was likely made aware of particularly Scottish currents of thought and how these are made manifest in the visual imagery and social function of several of his paintings. Historians of the Scottish Enlightenment have done well to point out that among the Lunar Society membership was of course James Watt, the favorite Scottish son of British industry. But the Scottish Enlightenment’s significance for the English East Midlands goes beyond Watt and his steam engine. The Lunar Society also counted among its Scottish contingent Dr. William Small, one time professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at the College of William and Mary where his progressive ideas conflicted with the conservative faculty, while inspiring such students as Thomas Jefferson. Small eventually found a new home and like minds among the natural philosophers in Birmingham and was held in the highest esteem until his death. Additionally, of course, there was Erasmus Darwin, poet, polymath and physician who was not Scottish,

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but obtained his medical degree from the University of Edinburgh where he no doubt circulated among that city’s elite intellectual circles.3 Significantly, Darwin was Wright’s personal friend, sometime patron, and physician from at least the 1770s until the painter’s death in 1797. It was Darwin who officially founded the Derby Philosophical Society in 1783 after moving to that town from Lichfield. The Scottish Enlightenment was also in this group well represented—not among its membership, but rather in its library. The society’s charter of 1783 established a highly structured organization with regular meetings, membership dues, absentee penalties, and a private circulating library. The collection was initially endowed presumably with contributions from the members’ personal libraries and expanded with money from dues. It contained an array of books on natural philosophical subjects by British and Continental authors, including Rousseau and Franklin. But it also included the works of Thomas Reid, James Beattie, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, Archibald Alison, and James Hutton, as well as a subscription to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It is interesting to note that while Rousseau, Reid and Beattie were featured, there were no texts by David Hume, indicating that the group was not only cognizant of what is now known as the Scottish Enlightenment, but also they were informed enough to take sides in its debates. When discussing Wright’s work in the context of the Derby Philosophical Society’s intellectual milieu, it is only fair to admit that I am making a few assumptions. The fact that the Derby organization was not officially founded until 1783 presents a problem when dealing with paintings that predate that year. Wright’s ties to the people who would later make up the group’s membership, however, often predate the founding of the society and it is reasonable to assume that the members’ philosophical interests did as well. In other words, their intellects were not suddenly piqued with the foundation of the society; the currents of thought had begun to flow before they were channeled into a group identity. It is, therefore, not unlikely that Wright was continuously exposed to enlightened ideas and part of progressive circles between the slow demise of the Lunar Society and the founding of its successor in Derby. It was also during this period that the artist broadened his horizons by traveling to Liverpool, Italy and Bath. In Painting for Money, David Solkin points out that the artist’s major candlelight pictures of the 1760s use natural philosophical subjects to depict a private morality for a public that saw itself in the pictures.4 He argues that their moral didacticism was apparent to the educated middleclass exhibition-goers and the paintings thereby subverted previous

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aesthetic theories by conflating history painting and the conversation piece, public virtue and private fancy, suggesting that the appreciation of the fine arts was not limited to a landed aristocracy.5 But the examples Solkin uses are only conversation pieces in that some of the figures are identifiable portrait-likenesses of known models; the paintings, however, were unlikely meant to be more than large-scale genre scenes. Therefore, the conflation is not between history and conversation piece, but rather between genre and history. Any perceived elision of public and private is derived from the size of the pictures, unless one’s definition of ‘public’ is restricted to the Midlands elite, who are in fact depicted and whose private virtue informed their public roles in a Shaftesburian sense. However, Solkin also suggests that the aesthetic philosophy of George Turnbull, rather than the ideas of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, informed Wright’s pictorial interests in natural philosophy because, unlike Shaftesbury, Turnbull did not separate natural from moral philosophy.6 Rather, he advocated natural philosophy as a vehicle for teaching and learning morality. Moreover, Solkin believes Wright painted pictures with the potential power of exhibition in mind.7 Taking his ideas as a point of departure, I argue first that it was not Turnbull’s theories that influenced Wright, but Thomas Reid’s; next, that there exists a pattern in the Derby artist’s oeuvre, particularly after his return from Italy, of depicting tragic women of literature and history; and, finally, that these pictorial subjects were intended to affect the viewers’ sensibilities directly for the purpose of moral improvement.8 The effect on the senses and, ultimately, the mind and body, of outside stimuli was of great importance to both philosophers and physicians in their attempts to understand the human mind and body. By understanding how the senses worked, physicians would be better able to diagnose and to treat both mental and physical illnesses. Philosophers recognized that human society could benefit from the cultivation of sensibility and feeling. Abolitionists, for example, appealed to the sensibility of those morally opposed to slavery as part of their quest to abolish the slave trade by conjuring verbal and visual images of slavery’s evils.9 Others, like the third earl of Shaftesbury, made a case for Taste as a “higher” sense—part of a private moral sensibility (politeness) that could be applied benevolently to a public body politic by an exclusive ruling class.10 Sensibility was also pertinent for poets and artists, linked as it was to ideas about sympathy and aesthetics. The description of a scene—by word or image—could theoretically move the reader/viewer emotionally by its affecting the mind by way of the auditory or visual sensory organs. Illustrating my point in a letter to Josiah Wedgwood, Benjamin Franklin

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astutely noted the potential equivalency of sensible effect from image and text. Thanking the potter for a gift of anti-slavery cameos, he wrote that he was distributing them among friends “in whose Countenances I have seen such marks of being affected by contemplating the Figure of the Supplicant (which is admirably executed) that I am persuaded it may have an effect equal to that of the best written pamphlet in procuring favour to those oppressed People.”11 A single image could, it was thought, be created to deliver the same emotional impact of a text written for a like sentimental purpose. Meanwhile, throughout the eighteenth century the didacticism of particular subjects in the visual arts was thought among the art academies of Europe to rise above the immediacy of emotional appeal and to elevate the viewer intellectually and, thus, morally in both private and public contexts.12 In his emotionally charged works, however, Wright targets the sensibility of his viewers in order to elevate both their intellect and morality. This is especially the case, as we shall see in the next chapter, when the artist combines history and romantic sensibility in a manner similar to Henry Fuseli, but without the latter’s tendency towards Gothic absurdity.13 *** As early as 1768 Wright appealed to his viewers’ sensibilities with his image of a young girl horrified and turning away from the spectacle before her in An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump [Plate 4-1]. The suffering of the suffocating bird proves too much for the girl to watch. It is an assault on her naïve (innate) sensibility that moves her physically to twist and face in the other direction. Such is the power of sympathy. The men, by contrast, appear unaffected and detached as they observe the same scene. Solkin attributes this, in Shaftesburian terms, to the girl’s lack of sophistication and undeveloped politeness, remedied on the part of the men by their experience and education, not to mention, perhaps, gender.14 For the men, the life of the bird is merely an incidental detail as compared with the demonstration’s didactic importance as a whole. According to Solkin, the painting is the visual embodiment of Turnbull’s conflation of natural and moral philosophy, where the former is used as a vehicle for conveying the latter. However, it was Turnbull’s student Thomas Reid, who was better known to both the Lunar and Derby Philosophical Societies. While Joseph Priestley may have taken issue with Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind in a harsh published critique (1774), the fact that Reid’s text later appears in the Derby Philosophical Society library while neither Turnbull’s works

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nor Priestley’s essay do, indicates that the other Lunar members who came to be part of the later group—Darwin, Wedgwood, etc.—may not have valued Priestley’s opinions on subjects other than chemistry (and perhaps politics),15 and were perhaps rather interested in more current theories of the human mind than Turnbull’s philosophy. Thomas Reid, however, seems a nearer and likelier source of influence for Wright. Significantly, Reid theorized that perception is a fundamental part of both common sense (“common understanding”) and more advanced, intellectual ideas (“science”): Perception, whether original or acquired, implies no exercise of reason; and is common to men, children, idiots, and brutes. The more obvious conclusions drawn from our perceptions, by reason, make what we call common understanding; by which men conduct themselves in the common affairs of life, and by which they are distinguished from idiots. The more remote conclusions which are drawn from our perceptions, by reason, make what we commonly call science in the various parts of nature, whether in agriculture, medicine, mechanics, or in any part of natural philosophy.16

Therefore, disturbed by what she sees, the girl responds in accordance with the limits of her perception, while the men are able to move past the bird’s danger by reasoning deeper scientific conclusions. Such a painted juxtaposition of visible response at once exaggerated the perceived intellectual gulf between the genders while making a cogent point about age and experience. Educated men, however, were not incapable of feeling sympathy. The third earl of Shaftesbury believed that experiencing the pleasures of sympathy was the foundation of human happiness.17 It was an exercise in politeness, which was itself a fundamental ingredient of civic humanism. Similarly, David Hartley had written that compassion and mercy arose from feelings of sympathy, believing this to be a pleasurable experience.18 But, it was Adam Smith, another Scot, who summarized Hartley’s words on the subject, allowing for a broader definition of sympathy in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was also, like Reid’s text, part of the Derby Philosophical Society library. Pity and compassion are words appropriated to signify our fellow-feeling with the sorrow of others. Sympathy, though its meaning was, perhaps, originally the same, may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.19

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The senses alone, however, were not sufficient to inspire fellowfeeling. According to Smith, it is only through imagination, stimulated by the senses, that one is able to experience sympathy.20 It would be two other Scots—Archibald Alison and Dugald Stewart—who, building on Hartley’s principles of “association,” would later connect the senses with imagination by the association of ideas.21 But by showing in one picture the object of sympathy and one sympathetic girl, Wright did not leave much to the imagination of the viewer. We do not actively experience the pleasure of sympathy, but passively observe it as partial pictorial subject— a sentimental foil to cool observation. In later years, however, Wright would more directly engage viewers’ imaginations with the theme of pathos, particularly in depictions of tragic women of history and literature. I believe this pictorial transition was in part directly related to Wright’s full exposure to Scottish Enlightenment ideas filtered through literary sources like the poetry of James Beattie and the fiction of Laurence Sterne,22 and, certainly by 1783, through his friends in the Derby Philosophical Society. The artist’s shift toward direct engagement of the viewer(s) may be understood as the visual equivalent of Reid’s appeal to common sense. As Peter Diamond demonstrates: Reid was convinced that philosophy must be informed by, and appeal to, the sentiments of men of ordinary understanding if it was to teach them to live virtuously…. Consequently, the manner in which philosophy is written appeared to be of moral consequence. By adopting the ambiguous concept of “common sense” as the touchstone of moral and philosophical enquiry, Reid may have detracted from the analytical rigour of his scientific approach. However, he had another, inseparable purpose. He hoped to appeal to the common basis of experience in polite and improving circles in contemporary Scotland and to ensure that the science of man would be humane.23

Whether the artist read firsthand the appropriate books that would later be featured in the Derby society’s library or gleaned a secondary working knowledge from conversations with Darwin and others is not germane to the present argument. Sensibility was a concept nonetheless familiar and important to Wright and deeply informs his art. I believe, therefore, that his paintings of such subjects were part of his participation in societal “improvement” as both an artist and a “private gentleman.”24 Specifically, they manipulated the sensibilities of the viewers for the purpose of their intellectual and moral improvement, to cultivate their politeness and to validate their public roles as disinterested patricians or private gentlemen. ***

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Wright painted two versions of Maria (1777 and 1781) and two of The Captive (1774 and unknown)—both subjects taken from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). Literary scholars have pointed out that it is in Sentimental Journey that Sterne first fully outlines and realizes the pathetic image, setting it before the readers’ imaginations “as it appears to the mind of Yorick.”25 Indeed, it is not entirely surprising that Sterne had been an amateur painter in his own right, nor that he was aware of changing trends in English art from Hogarth to Reynolds, as William Holtz has demonstrated.26 It is to the earlier Maria that I shall first turn attention. The painting’s iconography is taken directly from Yorick’s—Sterne’s first-person narrator’s—detailed description: I discovered poor Maria sitting under a poplar—she was sitting with her elbow in her lap, and her head leaning on one side within her hand—a small brook ran at the foot of the tree.... She was dressed in white, ... her hair hung loose .... She had superadded likewise to her jacket, a pale green ribband which fell across her shoulder to the waist; at the end of which hung her pipe.27

The artist posed Maria as a semi-reclining melancholic, simultaneously recalling numerous classical reclining sculptures of women of antiquity.28 Executed as a companion to The Captive (1774) [Fig. 4-1], she faces right to complement the leftward direction of the prisoner, and at her feet is the epitome of fidelity, an attentive dog. Her garb is neither antique nor contemporary, giving her a quality of timelessness also felt in Sterne’s writing. Wright depicted Yorick’s sentimental explanation (i.e., Sterne’s description) of Maria’s melancholic state in order to evoke sympathy. The narrator indicates that the woman once had a goat that had been “as faithless as her lover,” and that the dog, Sylvio, is a replacement.29 Yorick happens upon her as she sits sulking and Maria pulls the dog closer, saying distrustfully, “Thou shalt not leave me, Sylvio.”30 However, it is neither about the lover nor the goat that she is sad, but rather her father, as Yorick finds out by looking into her eyes. [F]or as she utter’d them [the words to her dog] the tears trickled down her cheeks. I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief.—I then steep’d it in my own—and then in hers—and then in mine—and then I wip’d hers again—and as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. I am positive I have a soul.…31

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Fig. 4-1. Joseph Wright, The Captive, from Sterne (1774). Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver.

Through the voice of his narrator, Sterne demonstrated both Reid’s and Smith’s ideas about sympathy. Yorick perceives Maria and reasons beyond “common understanding.” He acts with compassion by wiping away her tears and is moved to the lachrymose state (imagined empathy), finding pleasure in the realization of his humanity. A viewer of Wright’s painting, doubtless knowledgeable of Maria’s tragic story of loneliness, betrayal and grief, would have theoretically reacted to her image in much the same way. The artist ensured this emotive response by not including the narrator in the painted scene. In this way the viewer becomes Yorick, emphasizing the fact that the painter appealed directly to the beholder’s sympathy for a didactic purpose. The (male) observer was supposed to have been moved to weep as he imagined wiping away Maria’s tears, and in feeling such compassion for another human, was to realize ultimately and pleasantly that he too had a soul. Elizabeth Kraft writes of the sentimental purpose of Yorick’s journey:

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The kind of knowledge and improvement he [Yorick] hopes to gain has nothing to do with facts, buildings, and customs. His travels are ‘sentimental travels,’ and he seeks feeling, not fact:... [I]t is not the knowledge of place, but the regeneration of feeling that he pursues.32

Like Yorick, Wright had traveled to the Continent, perhaps in search of feeling instead of fact. In his painting there is similarly no specific “knowledge of place;” thus, it must have been the visual regeneration of literary feeling that he pursued and hoped that the viewer would, too. For Yorick, it is pleasurable to experience sympathy for another since it reaffirms possession of a soul.33 It seems that Wright, pictorially at least, identified with the narrator’s sentimental experience and the pleasure derived from it. Kraft believes that it is especially pleasurable for Yorick to feel compassion for a woman, since it redeems his sexual desire. She describes this redemption as consisting “of the transformation of erotic passion into concern for another.”34 Women from the Continent, particularly in France and Italy but especially the latter, were often perceived as erotic simply because of their ‘otherness.’ Chloe Chard has linked the eroticization of these women to the idea of the Grand Tour as not only the crossing of geographical, but also behavioral, boundaries: In other words, British male travelers were more apt to partake in licentious behavior with foreign women of intrigue while temporarily abroad, whom they saw as having “lower” moral standards.35 Travel literature particularly presented foreign women to a predominantly male readership as one of the worthy sights to see—a reason to travel in and of itself. These women were familiarly feminine and maternal, while simultaneously erotically mysterious and tempting.36 The suppression of base desires may be one of many specific didactic lessons to be learned from both Sterne and Wright; however, the important thing to realize is that there was meant to be some moral message conveyed through the vehicle of sensibility, readable in Yorick’s account and mirrored by the sympathetic/desirous beholder(s) of Wright’s Maria. Judith Frank explains such corporeal legibility: In many cases, the body is not an obfuscatory covering; rather, it is a physiology that guarantees the subject’s transparency, making intentions and true character visible to others. This happens particularly in the case of women, whose bodies are utterly legible, and of the benevolist himself, who exemplifies the “feminine” qualities of pity and pathos.37

Thus, it is in transforming desire into sympathy, or imagined empathy, that the male “benevolist”—in Wright’s case, his predominantly male, middle-class audience/circle of patrons38—assumes a feminized character,

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becomes morally improved, having not given in to baser instincts, and experiences the egocentric pleasure of his encounter.39 It is significant that Wright conceived of Maria (1777) as a companion piece to his male Captive [Fig. 4-1]. The latter had been painted in Rome in 1774 and was, according to Catherine Gordon, the first painted treatment of the subject by a major artist.40 Sterne/Yorick also spelled out the iconography for Wright’s picture. The idea of imprisonment is first introduced in A Sentimental Journey when Yorick realizes that he is in Paris without his passport at a time when Britain was at war with France. While in the process of rationalizing his situation, his thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a caged starling, speaking in English the words of lament: “I can’t get out.” Feeling compassion for the imprisoned bird, he unsuccessfully attempts to free it.41 Later, when he resumes thinking about the possibility of his own imprisonment, he recalls the starling, and (à la Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments) employs his imagination to elicit the sympathy necessary for his own comfort.42 In his mind, Yorick creates a captive and imprisons him in a dungeon with a “grated door” through which he could anonymously observe the imaginary prisoner. The traveler describes the scene: I then look’d through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture. I beheld his body half wasted away with long expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of the heart it was which arises from hope deffer’d. Upon looking nearer I saw him pale and feverish: in thirty years the western breeze had not once fann’d his blood.... But here my heart began to bleed—and I was forced to go on with another part of the portrait. He was sitting upon the ground upon a little straw, in the furthest corner of the dungeon, which was alternately his chair and bed: a little calendar of small sticks were laid at the head notch’d all over with dismal days and nights he had pass’d there.... As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless eye towards the door, then cast it down.... He gave a deep sigh—I saw the iron enter into his soul—I burst into tears.43

Yorick thus summons forth tears of sympathy via his imagination to alleviate the guilt arising from his inability to free the starling. The episode also allows him to imagine the incarceration with which he was threatened (for not having his passport) without actually picturing himself as the prisoner. He would rather observe the captive than trade places with him, feel sympathy rather than empathy. Wright’s Captive shows the scene “as it appears to the mind of Yorick,” with the prisoner seated on some straw-covered masonry in the cell where he is chained. A grated window is visible at the upper left, recalling the portal through which Yorick gazed; however, as in Maria, the

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narrator is nowhere to be seen. Once again, Wright ensured the viewer’s direct identification with Yorick.44 The beholder’s sensibility was to reduce him, theoretically, to compassionate tears that would reaffirm his humanity; however, as the feeling passed, he could take comfort in the fact that it was not he who was imprisoned in such squalor. Like Yorick, the well-heeled viewer of Wright’s work probably preferred sympathy to empathy and was supposed to derive egocentric pleasure from his ‘encounter’ with a less-fortunate, marginalized other.45 Patricia Meyer Spacks argues that the difference between male and female sensibility in Sterne’s writing is that the male “hero of sensibility allows himself to feel. His female counterpart can’t help herself.”46 In this way, the male reader/viewer, too, was especially able to experience pleasurable sympathy. Wright’s second version of Maria (1781) [Fig. 4-2] was executed as a companion piece to Edwin (1778) [Fig. 3-2], the protagonist of James Beattie’s poem The Minstrel (1777-78). For the former the artist chose the same moment in Sterne’s narrative as before, but this time altered Maria’s pose and included her “pipe”—a recorder. Maria sits in a more upright position on either a rock or a tree stump instead of on the ground, facing left, with legs crossed left over right, framed by autumnal foliage. Her pose may have been influenced partly by Angelica Kauffman’s treatment of the same subject in a very small oval painting on copper from 1777. But Wright’s version, much larger in size, surely had more visual and emotionally didactic impact than Kauffman’s small decorative piece.47 Wright’s Maria mirrors her male companion, Edwin, almost exactly, reifying their intended relationship.48 He faces right, holding a recorder, seated on a rock, with legs crossed right over left, framed by similar landscape elements. Both Maria and Edwin are depicted in typical melancholic poses with heads in hand, recalling Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated engraving Melancholia; however, Maria appears much more distressed than the dreamy Edwin, since she stares intensely at the ground while he gazes in reverie at the distant sky.49 Although they are iconographically and compositionally similar, the paintings are more poignantly related by virtue of their fundamental difference of attitude, which is subtly apparent in their facial expressions and confirmed by a close reading of their textual sources. Both Edwin and Maria isolate themselves in nature for the purpose of melancholic reflection. Like Sterne, Beattie strove in his poem for the regeneration of feeling rather than the knowledge of place. In response to questions about his own similarity to Edwin, Beattie claimed: “I confess the supposition is not groundless. I have made him take pleasure in the scenes in which I took pleasure, and entertain sentiments

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Fig. 4-2. Joseph Wright, Maria, from Sterne (1781). © Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby.

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The poet intended Edwin to take pleasure in his solitude. Such lines as “Ah! what is mirth but turbulence unholy / When with the charm compared of heavenly melancholy?” seem to attest to the positive side of isolation. Conversely, Maria is not alone by choice. Her lover and her goat have abandoned her, and the only company she keeps is her dog, thanks, presumably, to its leash. Her isolation is far from pleasurably contemplative. Maria is lonely and depressed, seeking solace in the memory of her departed father. This is how Yorick finds her. It is also, again, how Wright portrays her sans Yorick in order that the viewer’s sensibility be directly affected to produce sympathetic feelings that were to improve him morally. Perhaps the artist intended these paintings to hang together in order to illustrate didactically the dichotomy of melancholy, both positive and negative. It is important to note that not all artists’ renderings of Maria show her alone. The inclusion of Yorick in the visualization of the narrative allowed some to find a hint of indecency. That all four of Wright’s pictures from Sterne are quite serious, chaste and literal, single-figure depictions of the author’s subjects had previously been puzzling to me, too, since I most often consider Sterne a somewhat comical writer, full of satire, irony and downright bawdiness. But Catherine Gordon has convincingly shown that there was a change in the perception of Sterne (and his works) from “an ennobling and improving author whose works… taught compassion by the lessons of sensibility” in the 1770s and 80s to one whose writings produced, as William Wilberforce complained, “a morbid sensibility in the perception of indecency.”51 This perception of indecency, Gordon argues, was simultaneously visualized in the two-figure compositions, depicting both Yorick and Maria. Not only would such pairings have eliminated the sentimental immediacy found in Wright’s compositions, it theoretically corrupted the viewers by positioning them as voyeurs of a potentially lewd and lustful act. But Wright clearly viewed Sterne as a sincere author of sentimental virtue and his paintings of Maria and the Captive, therefore, have a similar function: to ennoble and improve.

Notes 1

Robinson, “The Derby Philosophical Society,” 359-67 and Sturges, “The Membership of the Derby Philosophical Society,” 212-29. See also Sturges, “Cultural Life in Derby,” chapter 6, passim. 2 Derby Philosophical Society, Rules and Catalogue and Ibid., Catalogue of the Library, and Ledger.

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See David Daiches, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” in Daiches, Peter Jones, and Jean Jones, eds., A Hotbed of Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment, 1730-1790 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986). 4 Solkin, Painting for Money, chapter 6, passim, and Idem., “ReWrighting Shaftesbury.” 5 Ibid., Painting for Money, 224-25. 6 Ibid., Painting for Money, 228-35. See also George Turnbull, A Treatise on Ancient Painting (London, 1740). 7 Ibid., Painting for Money, 230-31. An element of commercialism plays into his argument here viz. Wright attempting to secure major London commissions and his painting for the print market. 8 These paintings are: The Corinthian Maid (c. 1783-85, National Gallery, Washington, Paul Mellon Collection), Penelope, Unravelling Her Web by Lamplight (1785, J. Paul Getty Museum), The Lady from Milton’s Comus (1785, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), and The Indian Widow (1785, Derby Museum and Art Gallery). 9 For instance, see David Bindman, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother? British Art and Slavery in the Eighteenth Century,” RES (Autumn 1994): 68-82. 10 Solkin, Painting for Money, passim, but chapters 5 and 6 are especially pertinent here. See also Barrel, The Political Theory of Painting, 1-68, and Solkin, “ReWrighting Shaftesbury.” 11 Franklin to Wedgwood, May 15, 1789. Wedgwood Archive, 19080-26. 12 For Rome see Christopher Johns, Papal Art and Cultural Politics: Art in the Age of Clement XI (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 2, passim, and Ibid., “Papal Patronage and Cultural Bureaucracy in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Clement XI and the Accademia di San Luca,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1998): 1-23. For France see: Candace Clements, “The Duc D’Antin, the Royal Administration of Pictures, and the Painting Competition of 1727,” Art Bulletin (December 1996): 647-662. 13 Martin Myrone, Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 17501810 (London: Yale University Press, 2005), 227-251. “…Gothic romance, a passion that was necessarily absurd in the context of the modern world. The absurdity of Fuseli’s art, the themes of supernaturalism and improbable heroism, the forging of literary sources and the inflated pictorial language match this absurdity.” (240) 14 Solkin, “ReWrighting Shaftesbury,” 95-6. 15 To be fair, the Derby Philosophical Society’s library catalogue contains listings for three of Priestley’s publications: “82. Priestley’s experiments on air…237. Ditto ditto, &c. new edition…330. _______ on the generation of air from water.” The preceding numbers are accession numbers, indicating order of acquisition. 16 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, On the Principles of Common Sense (Dublin: Alexander Ewing, 1764), 247. 17 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1771), ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. in one (Indianapolis, 1964), i, 300. See also Solkin, “ReWrighting Shaftesbury,” 86-8.

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David Hartley, “On the Pleasures and Pains of Sympathy,” in [David] Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, On the Principles of the Association of Ideas (1748), ed. Joseph Priestley (London: J. Johnson, 1775), 305-11. 19 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Millar, 1759), 6. 20 Smith, Moral Sentiments, 2. 21 See Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (London: J.J.G. and G. Robinson, and Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1790), 112, and Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1792), 27885. 22 Kenneth MacLean pointed out that Sterne’s interest in sympathy in A Sentimental Journey stemmed from his general interest in the imagination, which had been plainly shown in Tristram Shandy and Eliza. The connection between imagination and sympathy for Sterne operates in very much the same way as it does for Adam Smith. See MacLean, “Imagination and Sympathy: Sterne and Adam Smith,” Journal of the History of Ideas (10: 3, 1949), 399-410. 23 Peter J. Diamond, Common Sense and Improvement: Thomas Reid as Social Theorist (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 173. 24 My terminology comes from Wright’s friend and patron, Rev. Thomas Gisborne, who was also a DPS member. See Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties, 574-75: “Private gentlemen may be considered under the following characters: first, as land-owners; secondly, as invested with various offices and trusts of a public nature; and thirdly, as bound to the performance of numerous private and domestic duties…. These duties result partly from the actual power which the landlord enjoys over his estates, and the tenants who occupy them….” 25 MacLean, 406. 26 William Holtz, “Sterne, Reynolds, and Hogarth,” The Art Bulletin (48: 1, March 1966), 82-84. 27 Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy to which are added The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance, ed. James Kinsley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 114. 28 Chloe Chard has suggested that the pose of Maria recalls specifically the Weeping Dacia, who would be an appropriate model of sympathy as she is the personification of a province conquered by the ancient Romans. See Chard, “Grand and Ghostly Tours: The Topography of Memory,” Eighteenth-Century Studies (Fall 1997): 105, 108 n. 28 and 29. 29 One would also have been privy to this information had one read Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in which Maria is featured with a lover and a goat. 30 Both quotes from Sterne, Sentimental, 114. 31 Ibid., 114. 32 Elizabeth Kraft, Laurence Sterne Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 107. 33 Ibid., 125-6: “That such feeling is basically egocentric does not render it less worthy.... Flattery, like all other human skills, can be used for base ends, but it is also the surest path to the heart and a sure means by which the heart can be opened to the needs of another. The language of sensibility is essentially flattery, and as

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such a universal language, bridging the gap, in Yorick’s case, between French and English.” See also Judith Frank, “‘A Man Who Laughs is Never Dangerous’: Character and Class in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey,” English Literary History (Spring 1989): 97-124, where she quotes Bridget Orr about the sentimental novel: “The text attempts to construct a closed system in which anxiety and guilt can be transformed into a pleasurable (and fashionable) aesthetic experience.” (99) 34 Kraft, 112. 35 Chard, “Crossing Boundaries and Exceeding Limits,” 117-149. See also Sondra Rosenberg, “Travel Literature and the Picaresque Novel,” Enlightenment Essays (Spring 1971): 40-47. Similarly, Rosenberg compares the genre of travel literature to that of the picaresque novel, writing: “Like the hero of that [picaresque] genre, the hero of the travel book is an outsider in the world in which he finds himself. He has no roots in the culture he is in, and he thus is able to move freely about in it.” (40) She concludes that Sterne is “concerned with Yorick’s state of mind, or rather state of feeling, but what produces this state is not France specifically, but rather being abroad, a suspension of routine and responsibility.” (46) 36 Chard, “Grand and Ghostly Tours,” 101-108. 37 Frank, 100. 38 With just a cursory glance at Wright’s “Account Book,” and knowing what is to be known about the DPS and the Lunar Society of Birmingham, etc., the predominance of wealthy, middle-class men in his circle seems a fair assumption. See notes 1 and 2, and Schofield, Lunar Society. 39 Is this pleasure a sentimental substitute for sexual gratification? It is also worth noting that the Apollo Belvedere was appreciated aesthetically precisely because it combined in its form exactly the correct amounts of masculine strength with feminine grace, as opposed to the overly brawny Farnese Hercules and the excessively feminine Belvedere Antinous. The pleasure derived by a male from the stimulation of his “feminine” sensibility could be related to the notion of the “partially-feminine” Apollo as the accepted ideal of masculine beauty—a happy and inoffensive medium. See Chard, “Effeminacy, Pleasure and the Classical Body,” in Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, eds. Gill Perry and Michael Rossington (New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 142-61. Chard discusses how male travel writers “got in touch with their feminine sides” through the agency of fictional female companions who served as a feminine foil to their masculine commentary. 40 Catherine M. Gordon, British Paintings of Subjects from the English Novel, 1740-1870 (New York: Garland, 1988), 71-73. 41 Yorick eventually adopts the starling as part of his family crest. The elision of the starling and the narrator’s family name was Sterne’s subtle way of indicating that he and Yorick were one and the same because sternus is latin for ‘starling.’ See Miller, “The Insufficiency, Success, and Significance of Natural History,” 519-34. 42 Sterne, 72: “The bird in his cage pursued me into my room; I sat down close to my table, and leaning my head upon my hand, I begun to figure to myself the miseries of confinement. I was in a right frame for it, and so I gave full scope to .

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my imagination.” The link between sympathy and imagination common to Sterne and Smith is made plain in this passage. See MacLean, 400-404. 43 Ibid., 73. Note the painterly language—“to take his picture” and “portrait”—as though Sterne were describing Wright’s completed painting. Indeed, this language may have called the artist’s attention to the passage. It surely solidified his identification with the narrator. See also Frédéric Ogée, “Channelling Emotions: Travel and Literary Creation in Smollett and Sterne,” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (292: 1991), 27-42. He writes of Sterne’s sentimental aesthetics: “... Sterne raises the notion of journey to use as a metaphor of artistic creation in which subjectivity and intimacy, as opposed to pseudo-scientific objectivity, are celebrated. [Tobias] Smollett’s work [Travels Through France and Italy (1766)] belongs to the Augustan age of reason and order, in which French disorder only stands as a foil to British sound values, whereas Sterne’s, written only a few years [two] later, is the prefiguration of a later era whose anguish and interrogations momentarily find refuge in transient bursts of sensibility, in sentimental epiphanies.” (42) 44 Conversely, Benjamin West’s The Captive, known only from an engraving, depicts Yorick peering into the cell through a “grated door.” This has the effect of removing the viewer from the direct participation that one gets in Wright’s version. By seeing Yorick himself undergo his imaginative, sentimental experience, one observes, but does not feel, sympathy. Moral improvement is only to be had by the narrator. The print after West is reproduced in Gordon, pl. 57. 45 Frank writes of the male “benevolist:” “Through self-parody, the parody of his own potential marginalization, he both withstands the oppression of the aristocracy and becomes privy to the secrets of others’ hearts. In other words, he constitutes himself as a bourgeois subject.” (99) 46 My emphasis. See Spacks, “Oscillations of Sensibility,” New Literary History (25, 1994), 506. 47 Kauffman’s oval picture measures 12.25” x 10”, while Wright’s is 63” x 45.5”. 48 Egerton, building on information found in Bemrose’s The Life and Work of Joseph Wright, ARA (1885), writes that the model for Maria was most probably Mary Bassano, wife of Richard Bassano of Derby. The Bassano lineage dates back to the family’s emigration from Italy as court musicians to Henry VIII in the sixteenth century and includes in its genealogy Emilia Bassano, who may have been Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Egerton believes that the prominence given to the recorder in Maria (and Edwin?) “may partly be a compliment to the musical gifts of the Bassano family.” See Egerton, Wright of Derby, 115. 49 I have already discussed Edwin’s relationship to the melancholic Brooke Boothby (1780-81), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiographical writings and Dr. James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1774) and Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) in my previous chapter. 50 Beattie in a letter to the Dowager Lady Forbes, quoted in Forbes, Beattie and His Friends, 55. Italics are my own. 51 Gordon, 79.

CHAPTER FIVE ROBINS’S ROOMS, 1785: PUBLIC VIRTUE, PRIVATE MORALITY

It was Wright’s solo exhibition of 1785 that purposefully and most successfully orchestrated the unity of moral and natural philosophy in the specific display of four of its paintings of tragic women with the assistance of printed catalogue descriptions.1 The combination of text and images helped ensure the viewers’ visual understanding, aiding the stimulation of the imagination in order to evoke feelings of sympathy and the social pleasure derived from such emotional experiences.2 Exhibitions featuring the work of a single artist are today quite common and often represent one of the highest achievements of living contemporary artists; however, in the eighteenth century they were less common and especially rare among artists of academic caliber. Wright’s decision to exhibit his work alone in an area known for theatrics—Covent Garden—was surely intended to create an anomalous display set boldly against and in close proximity to the concurrent exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts. One of the most obvious reasons that may have influenced the artist’s decision was his row with the Royal Academy just two years earlier, when he was passed over for election. His friend, the poet William Hayley, likely encouraged Wright to conceive of an opposing display; the exhibition catalogue was originally intended to include Hayley’s Ode to Wright of Derby, which is an overt critique of the Academy’s exclusion. The episode is discussed at length below and need not be prematurely rehearsed here, but one must keep in mind that Wright’s limited association with the Royal Academy, as well as his experiences exhibiting with the Societies of Artists in London and Liverpool, provided him with a theoretical model for the ideal functions and practices of public exhibitions and a sense for who constituted the viewing public. His 1785 show, therefore, should be seen, along with his limited participation in Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery in the latter part of the same decade, as Wright’s exploration of alternative exhibition schemes. In this, it seems, the artist may have had at least three other

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models: Nathaniel Hone’s 1775 solo retrospective; James Barry’s Series of Pictures upon the Subject of Human Culture, which he painted for the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce and exhibited in 1783 with a very descriptive catalogue;3 and Thomas Gainsborough’s solo show. Hone’s exhibition, like Wright’s, was motivated in part by a falling-out with the Royal Academy—the expulsion of his controversial painting The Conjuror from the Royal Academy exhibit. Though Hone’s show was a failure, the scandal that precipitated it and the bitterness of the artist were recent enough that Wright was certainly aware of it. The Derby artist likely also took notice of Barry’s show as it appeared the same year he was bickering with the RA; but Barry’s exposition was not a reaction to mistreatment per se, though he was known to be paranoid about potential conspiracies against him.4 And, of course, Hone’s, Barry’s, Gainsborough’s, Wright’s and Boydell’s exhibitions likely inspired Henry Fuseli’s decision to create his Milton Gallery of 1799, which, like Wright’s and Barry’s solo shows, was accompanied by explanatory text in the form of a catalogue.5 More will be said on Wright’s catalogue and his connections to Fuseli and his circle in due course. An Associate member of the Royal Academy (ARA) by 1781, Wright was certainly aware of its agenda to establish an official and exclusive British School of art upholding a hierarchy of genres and an elevated standard of aesthetics—the epitome of which was historical painting in the grand manner. The Academy intended to elevate national taste and to bring glory to the Crown by rivaling the great cultural institutions of the Continent. Foiled in his attempts to receive the professional respect that accompanied admittance as a full academician, Wright repeatedly criticized and ultimately rejected the institution that rejected him, but he did not entirely spurn its intellectual principles, as I shall demonstrate. The painter was clearly well-versed in the intellectual currents of sensibility from philosophical, medical, poetical and aesthetical points of view. Whether he read firsthand the appropriate books in his friends’ libraries (or in his own) or gleaned a secondary working knowledge from conversations with Darwin and others is not germane to the present argument. Sensibility was a concept nonetheless familiar and important to Wright and deeply informs his art. In fact his solo exhibition of 1785 was on one hand a decisive move in opposition to the London academic arts establishment, and on the other, part of his participation in societal “improvement” as both an artist and a “private gentleman.” 6 Specifically, it used visual and textual media in combination to manipulate the sensibilities of the viewers in attendance for the purpose of their intellectual

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and moral improvement, to cultivate their politeness and to validate and reinforce their public roles.

The Exhibition In 1785 Wright exhibited a selection of twenty-five paintings at Mr. Robins’s Rooms. G.[eorge?] Robins was the proprietor of the auction house at number nine, under the Great Piazza in Covent Garden, previously known as Langford’s. An exhibition catalogue was published for the occasion, designating the paintings numerically. The companion pieces are listed sequentially with several lengthy descriptions including literary quotations in a manner not unlike that of James Barry’s 1783 catalogue. Wright’s show opened, later than expected, on April 21 and the price of admission was one shilling.7 Having worked hard to coordinate the display, borrowing sold paintings from their owners, Wright was likely disappointed by the attendance;8 however, his timing could not have been worse. Mr. A[nthony?]. Walker had recently opened the exhibition of his ingenious Eidouranion at the Theatre Royal on April 13 to popular acclaim, which kept it open for several weeks.9 The admission prices were five shillings for a box, three for the orchestra pit, two for the lower gallery, and one for the upper. On April 28, a notice appeared advertising Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourgh’s third exhibition of the Eidophusikon, showing at the Exeter Change in the Strand with Mr. [Thomas] Jervais’s productions in stained glass and “several capital Transparent Paintings, by Mr. De Loutherbourgh, and Transparent Drawings by Mr. P[aul]. Sandby.”10 The Eidophusikon was a series of small moving stage sets that operated mechanically to reproduce the happenings of Nature—e.g., sunrise, sunset, and moonrise—without actors.11 The transparent pictures were painted or drawn on a type of oilcloth, hung in such a way as to be lit from behind, lending a colorful translucency akin to stained glass.12 The novelty of the Eidouranion and the Eidophusikon exhibitions may have been more appealing than Wright’s intimate display of paintings, especially as the admission prices were nearly the same. Moreover, adding insult to injury, the Royal Academy’s exhibition opened later than expected on April 28. Though Wright’s absence was conspicuous, remarked upon by critics, the draw of the official display must also have diminished the appeal of his understated one.13 One major reason behind the artist’s decision to mount a one-man show probably had to do with a falling-out he had with the Royal Academy.14 Wright had been elected an Associate Member of the

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Academy in November 1781. Trouble began the following year when the painter wrote to the institution’s Secretary, asking why he was listed as an Associate in the most recent exhibition catalogue, claiming he had been listed as Academician Elect in the previous one.15 The reply informed Wright condescendingly that he had never been more than an Associate.16 The following February he was passed over for full membership. Although the institution finally (reluctantly) offered the artist full academic status the following year, Wright refused it, even asking that his name be stricken from the roster of associates. Anthony Pasquin wrote a more colorful account of the RA’s rejection and belated election of Wright, ending with the painter kicking the secretary as a recompense for his presumption.17 That Wright’s decision to hold a solo show in London is related to this row is evidenced by his desire to have William Hayley’s Ode to Mr. Wright appended to the catalogue.18 Though it was published separately and did not appear in the catalogue, Hayley’s timely ode is clear in its support of Wright against the Royal Academy. Just in thy praise, thy country’s voice Loudly asserts thy signal power: In this reward may’st thou rejoice, In modest labour’s silent hour, Far from those seats, where envious leagues, And dark cabals, and base intrigues Exclude meek merit from his proper home; Where art, whom Royalty forbade to roam, Against thy talents clos’d her self-dishonour’d dome.19

The Robins’s Rooms exhibition was, therefore, at least in part, a direct response to the artist’s rejection by and opposition to the Academy. Indeed, as Rosie Dias points out, similar criticisms about the RA’s practices were mounting in the 1780s and many of these called into question the very role of the royal institution.20 Did the academy serve the interests of the public? Who was that public? Or was the RA a tyrannical institution serving only the privileged? Dias argues that there is a connection between such questioning of academic authority and the appearance in the 1790s of several thematic exhibitions and viewing galleries around the Pall Mall area, which created a geographic site of opposition away from Somerset House.21 However, I would argue that Wright’s show at Covent Garden, being in much closer proximity to the RA’s exhibition space, was all the more boldly oppositional particularly because it was not part of a concerted effort. The artist did not have the safety of numbers on his side and any perceived posturing against the RA would have been clearly understood to be his alone.

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A solo exposition rivaling that of the nation’s premier artistic institution also provided the perfect moment for Wright to display some of his most recent paintings together in the programmatic manner he must originally have intended. James Barry had two years earlier successfully orchestrated a thematically unified show of his work at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and this scheme likely encouraged the Derby artist. Wright’s intended arrangement of companion pieces had often been undermined in the past by the fact that his work was usually bought by private collectors who frequently split up companion pieces, buying one but not the other. Moreover, the painter had frequently complained about how poorly his works were hung at Society of Artists and Royal Academy exhibits, and a solo show would have allowed the artist total control of the display. John Bonehill argues that the artist’s overarching intent was to stand against the tyranny of the RA with a display that conjured truer notions of nationalistic pride by exhibiting a selection of work centered on Wright’s most ambitious and overtly patriotic picture, View of Gibraltar.22 His argument is an excellent one that seems to set Wright’s particular problems with the RA amid a broader national context, supported by recent scholarship on RA exhibitions and the role of that esteemed institution.23 However, I am particularly concerned with two pairs of pendants that were on view at Robins’s Rooms as a kind of display within a display, which evidences Wright’s continued concern with morally didactic historical painting in keeping with the intellectual principles of the RA in spite of his opposition to that institution: The Widow of an Indian Chief Watching the Arms of Her Deceased Husband (1785) with The Lady from Milton’s ‘Comus’ (1785); and Penelope Unravelling Her Web, by Lamplight (1785) with The Corinthian Maid (c. 1782-1785). Josiah Wedgwood owned three of the four paintings, but Indian Widow remained unsold.

The Pictures While working on Indian Widow [Fig. 5-1] Wright apparently contacted William Hayley for advice about how to depict a Native American woman, writing in April 1784 that the picture was almost finished, “but the figure for want of knowing the Dress of a Mourner is only an outline.... If you can give me any hints I shall be obliged to you....”24 Nicolson, correctly noting that the poet must not have been of much help, noticed some similarity in the pose of the widow and that of Maria (1777).25 Indeed, the figure of the widow seems to suffer from that

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Fig. 5-1. Joseph Wright, Indian Widow (1784). © Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby.

early-modern tendency to see non-Western others as noble savages à la Rousseau, perceiving them anachronistically as contemporaneous avatars of ancient Greece.26 Her pose, however, is more like the Maria of 1777 than the 1781 version. Sterne’s text (quoted above) relating Yorick’s encounter with Maria could also easily be applied to the widow. Instead of a poplar, the woman sits under a blasted oak tree painted and adorned with her late husband’s accoutrements of war. Like Maria, she sits on the ground in a semi-reclining pose, head resting on hand in a melancholic fashion. Her pseudo-native garb resembles Maria’s ahistorical dress, except that it is blue, not white, and it is less “modest”—although appropriate for a “noble savage.” If Maria’s pose may be likened to the Weeping Dacia, then the same may be said for the Indian widow. She, too, is a female exemplum virtutis in the neoclassical tradition. In teasing out the problems of defining Neoclassicism, Robert Rosenblum traced the theme of widowhood in late eighteenth-century art. He pointed out that widows often served artistically as effective subjects for combining the intellectual lessons of history and the sentimental,

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immediate (visual) appeal of pathos.27 Moreover, Rosenblum identified the development of a specific subcategory—the non-Western widow—that added the romantic flavor of the “exotic” to the mix while simultaneously recalling Rousseau’s appreciation for the stoic “noble savage.”28 LouisJean-François Lagrenée’s Two Widows of a Hindu Officer is an example that pre-dates Wright’s Indian Widow by only two years. Shown at the Salon of 1783, Lagrenée’s painting depicts the two wives of a slain Indian officer presenting themselves for sacrifice upon their husband’s funeral pyre in accordance with Hindu law. Each wife selflessly claimed that the other should be spared. In the end, the elder was allowed to live and the younger, pregnant widow was helped to her death by her brother.29 Wright’s Indian Widow is likewise a depiction of a non-Western (exotic) woman’s uncompromising devotion to her deceased husband. The iconographic/compositional similarities between Maria (1777) and Indian Widow may also point to the latter’s similarly didactic function. The Robins’s Rooms exhibition catalogue contains a description of the painting that helped viewers understand the subject, allowing them more easily to experience a fellow-feeling with the grieving woman.30 It describes the work as follows: This picture is founded on a custom which prevails among some of the savage tribes in America, where the widow of an eminent warrior is used to sit the whole day, during the first moon after his death, under a rude kind of trophy, formed by a tree lopped and painted, on which the weapons and martial habiliments of the dead are suspended. She remains in this situation without shelter, and perseveres in her mournful duty at the hazard of her own life from the inclemencies of weather.31

Based on this description and the fact that Wright was unaware of the woman’s traditional dress, Hugh Honour has shown convincingly that the artist based his painting on James Adair’s The History of the American Indians (1775), which describes the ritual of mournful isolation: And if he [the deceased] is a war-leader, she [his widow] is obliged for the first moon, to sit in the day-time under his mourning war-pole, which is decked with all his martial trophies, and must be heard to cry with bewailing notes. But none of them are fond of that month’s supposed religious duty, it chills, or sweats, and wastes them so exceedingly; for they are allowed no shade or shelter.32

The widow, like Maria, has down-cast eyes emphasizing the gravity of her situation. She seems to seek solace in the memory of her husband, much as Maria sadly thought of her deceased father. The sentiment is one of sadness, isolation, grief, and danger. The artist characteristically does

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not depict anyone else in the painting so that the sentiment—conveyed in both text and image—affects the viewer’s sensibility directly. The beholder must have been reminded of his or her own mortality while, through the vehicle of egocentrically pleasing sympathy, simultaneously being comforted by the emotional evidence of a shared morality and sense of humanity. Wright painted The Lady from Milton’s ‘Comus’ (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) as a companion piece to Indian Widow, the subject drawn from John Milton’s eponymous poetical masque. In the same letter to Hayley in which the artist asks for advice about the widow’s dress, he tells the poet: I have also nearly finished a Companion to the Indian Widow, the burst of light in wch. picture, suggested to Mrs. Beridge those lines from Comus, “Was I deceived? or did a sable Cloud / Turn forth her Silver lining on the Night &c.”33

It is noteworthy that there is a meteorological similarity between that passage from Milton’s masque and Wright’s painting of the widow that is carried over into the artist’s companion piece—one immediately notices the similar circular openings in the dark storm clouds in each work. The connection in all likelihood inspired Wright to paint a scene from Comus as a companion piece for the Robins’s Rooms exhibition. The passage from Milton’s masque was, significantly, reproduced in the catalogue: Was I deceiv’d, or did a sable cloud Turn forth her silver lining on the night? I did not err, there does a sable cloud Turn forth her silver lining on the night, And casts a gleam over this tufted grove.34

The subject of the masque must also have seemed an appropriate accompaniment to the widow’s mourning ritual. The wife of the deceased warrior participates in the act of ceremonial grieving because she is still his loyal and devoted wife. She sits exposed to the elements as a testament to her virtue. Similarly, the Lady in Milton’s Comus had been lost in the forest with her two brothers, who left her temporarily to go in search of food. Wright depicts the virginal woman appropriately dressed in white, comforted by the momentary beauty of the night sky, having been plagued by the distant sounds of bestial merriment. She soon finds herself the prey of Comus, a fictional son of the deities Bacchus and Circe, who abducts passers-by and forces them to drink of a cup that turns them into monstrous, licentious beasts. However, in the end, she survives because of her unassailable virtue and chastity. The moral of the story, that virtue will

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always triumph over depravity, is made clear in the last lines of the masque, spoken by the Attendant Spirit: Mortals, that would follow me / Love Virtue: she alone is free; She can teach ye how to climb / Higher than the sphery chime; Or if Virtue feeble were, / Heaven itself would stoop to her.35

Therefore, the two women in these companion pieces who are shown undergoing tragic experiences portray a common theme of virtuous womanhood. Wright portrays them both alone so that their sentiments may be directly communicated for the moral benefit of the viewer. A virtuous woman was the subject of another painting by Wright: Penelope Unravelling Her Web, by Lamplight [Plate 5-1]. The story comes from Homer’s Odyssey.36 Penelope was the wife of Ulysses, king of Utica, and mother of Prince Telemachos. Because her husband was away at Troy for over a decade and presumed dead, suitors urged the Queen to accept his death and remarry so that the chosen suitor could become king. She responded to their demands with a plea for them to wait until she finished weaving her web that was to serve as Ulysses’s burial shroud. To avoid remarriage and infidelity to her husband, however, Penelope unraveled the web each night, prolonging its completion for three more years. Ulysses finally returned and subsequently killed the suitors. Penelope’s virtuous fidelity was victorious. Wright’s catalogue entry for the painting reprints the pertinent lines from Alexander Pope’s poetic translation of The Odyssey: Elusive of the bridal-day, she gives Fond hopes to all, and all with hopes deceives. Did not the sun thro’ heaven’s wide azure roll’d For three long years the royal fraud behold. While she, laborious in delusion, spread The spacious loom, and mix’d the various thread? Where, as to life, the wondrous figures rise. Thus spoke the inventive queen, with artful sighs: “Tho’ cold in death Ulysses breathes no more, “Cease yet awhile, to urge the bridal hour; “Cease, till to great Laertes I bequeath “A talk of grief, his ornaments of death. “Lest when the Fates his royal ashes claim, “The Grecian matrons taint my spotless name. “When he, whom living mighty realms obey’d, “Shall want in death, a shroud to grace his shade.” Thus she: at once the generous train complies, Nor fraud mistrusts in virtue’s fair disguise:

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Chapter Five The work she ply’d; but, studious of delay, By night revers’d the labours of the day; While thrice the sun his annual journey made. The conscious lamp the midnight fraud survey’d.37

Wright depicts the faithful Queen in the act of unraveling her web, seated on the edge of Telemachos’s bed with her left foot on a stool, awaiting her husband’s return. Her pose is similar to that of the Indian Widow, except she does not rest her head in her hand. Penelope’s lowered eyes gaze lovingly on her sleeping son, and in the right foreground is a statue in silhouette of Ulysses, who symbolically watches over his family.38 Like the Indian Widow and Lady from Comus, we have in Penelope the theme of the virtuous woman; however, she is neither a virginal maiden, nor a widow, but, rather, a faithful wife and doting mother. The depiction of lovers separated by time and distance in which the male’s effigy is shown in silhouette must have made Penelope a perfect subject for a pendant to The Corinthian Maid [Plate 5-2], both purchased by Wedgwood. Wright had originally thought his patron might rather purchase The Alchymist (Derby Art Gallery, c. 1771), but the legendary association of alchemy with the mysteries of porcelain production probably caused Wedgwood to feel that it was an inappropriate subject, he being a producer of rival earthenware products.39 Wright, inspired by Hayley’s poetic Essay on Painting (1781), chose instead the Corinthian Maid. Rosenblum has found that there is another antique source for the subject besides Pliny’s story of the origin of painting, which never actually attributes the act to the young woman. Athenagoras’s Apologetics apparently makes the connection clear. Rosenblum quotes the 1714 English translation that says the Corinthian Maid “drew her lover’s picture on a wall as he lay by asleep.”40 Athenagoras recounts the story as the “Origin of Painting and/or Drawing.” Pliny’s account tells the story of a Corinthian maiden who helped her potter father invent the art of clay bas-reliefs. Her lover was fated to leave her for war with only the vague hope that he might someday return. The maiden, distressed by the inevitability of her lover’s departure, traced the shadow of his profile on the wall. As the emptiness of the outline only emphasized her lover’s absence, her father filled in the void with clay and fired it, making the first decorative profile ceramic bust. Hayley’s raconté elides the origins of painting, drawing, and bas-relief, indicating that among his sources was not only Pliny but also Athenagoras:

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O, Love! It was thy glory to impart Its infant being to this magic art; Inspir’d by thee, the soft Corinthian maid, Her graceful lover’s sleeping form portray’d: Her brooding heart his near departure knew, Yet long’d to keep his image in her view: Pleas’d she beheld the steady shadow fall, By the clear lamp upon the even wall: The line she trac’d with fond precision true, And, drawing, doated on the form she drew; Nor, as she glow’d with no forbidden fire, Conceal’d the simple picture from her sire: His kindred fancy, still to nature just, Copied her line, and form’d the mimic bust, Thus from thy power, inspiring LOVE, we trace The modell’d image, and the pencil’d face!41

Hayley’s version of the story shows how the subject would have appealed both to Wright, a painter, and Wedgwood, a potter. Reprinted in the Robins’s Rooms catalogue, it also indicated that the story of the Corinthian Maid is similar to that of Penelope in that both have to deal with the extended separation of lovers. Wright’s paintings of these subjects are also formally linked by the fact that they show their main figures in profile with the male figures represented, in some fashion, in silhouette, subtly referencing Wedgwood’s wares as well as the contemporary vogue for silhouette portraiture.42 The Corinthian maiden is also understood to be a figure of similar virtue because she will remain faithful to her departed lover (note the dog of fidelity in the painting), comforted by his mimetic image, much like Penelope’s statue of Ulysses. Wright’s Corinthian Maid was not, however, without controversy. Clearly recognizing that the subject was supposed to affect viewers’ sensibilities, Wedgwood raised an eyebrow of concern regarding the maiden’s dress: I could not speak to you when I was with the ladies at your house about the particular part of the drapery of the Corinthian Maid which I liked the least; but finding afterwards that some of the ladies had seen that part of the drapery in the same light with myself, and not being able to wait upon you again I begged Dr. Darwin to mention it to you. The objections were the division of the posteriors appearing too plain thro the drapery, & its striking so close, tho truly Grecian, as you justly observe, gave that part a heavy, hanging like/if I may use a new term/ appearance, as if it wanted a little shove up, which I only mention in illustration of the term hanging as used above.43

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Wright obliged, painting a more obfuscatory drapery to conceal better the offending division of the buttocks, although he must have thought Wedgwood overly prudish, since it was merely his version of à la Grec. But it should be noted that the painter’s own priggish sensibility had previously struggled with the depiction of the statue of Ulysses in Penelope. He wrote to Wedgwood about his dilemma: As it was customary among the Antients to make their Statues naked I had designed Ulisses [sic.] to be so, but being seen nearly in profile, the private parts became too conspicuous, for the bed chamber of the chaste Penelope. I therefore made him rest on his bow & put the Quiver in the other hand so as to cross the body & conceal that part wch. might give offence to our delicate Ladies. I consulted my friend Hayley upon it. He seems to object to it. “I am afraid[,”] says he, [“]the Quiver crossing the bottom of the Hero’s Belly, may to some saucy imaginations produce a ludicrous effect, & make [in] some prophane Way exclaim, ‘Happy is the man that hath his Quiver full.[’”]—He recommends a light drapery. I have painted one to it, but cou’d scarce do little enough it so injured the outline of the figure wch. alone is seen when a figure is in dark Shadow.44

In the end, Wright depicted Ulysses’s head in profile; but, by turning the body to three-quarter profile he avoids the silhouette of the hero’s “private parts.” A heavy drapery wraps around the warrior’s waist, completely concealing the offending protrusion, and over his raised right arm, which holds a spear (instead of a quiver of arrows). All care was taken to avoid offending the ladies’ sensibilities, including not only the women in Wedgwood’s family but also, presumably, those who might attend Wright’s show in London.

Departure from Earlier Work: A Case for Fuseli’s Influence Taken together, the four paintings of tragic women exhibited at the Robins’s Rooms exhibition in 1785 represent the culmination of the sentimental themes Wright had been working on since his return from Italy a decade earlier. However, they depart from the earlier works in at least one very significant way: these paintings do not visualize subjects that originate in contemporary novels and minor poetry (like Sterne and Beattie), but rather look to ancient and national literary canons (Pliny, Homer, and Milton) as well as unconventional sources (historical ethnographies) for timeless subjects worthy of proper historical painting. The shift towards more intellectually compelling literary sources seems to occur between 1783 and 1785 and has seemingly little to do with the

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stylistic change, which occurred in his artistic production in the mid1770s, attributed to his Italian journey. While William Hayley is an obvious catalyst for Wright’s exploration of more important literary sources, particularly because it was his poetical summary of the origin of painting that most directly informed Wright’s painting of that subject, there may be another, equally important contributing factor. Several scholars have pointed out that Wright spent much time with Ozias Humphreys and George Romney when in Rome. Though the latter two artists were also solidly part of the circle surrounding Henry Fuseli in the Eternal City, a dearth of evidence has prohibited Wright’s association with the Swiss artist and the Derby painter is rarely, if ever, mentioned in relation to Fuseli’s life and career, and vice versa. I, however, will attempt to make a case for a Wright-Fuseli connection based on the circumstantial evidence I have found, including some similarities in subject matter, sketching style, and timely events, as a way to explain Wright’s move towards more progressive stylistic depictions of subjects with greater historical and literary import. Fuseli began aggressively to explore the Romantic potential of certain Classical and traditional historical subjects while in Rome in the 1770s. Martin Myrone and others have pointed out that it was during these eight years that Fuseli abandoned the cool stoicism of Winckelmann’s classical ideals in favor of the emotional and physical dynamism of Michelangelo’s late works.45 Fuseli was not alone in these preoccupations. A number of artists in Rome from the beginning of the 1770s were similarly exploring the expressive potential of mannerism, and comparably dramatic subjects, including the Scottish painter Alexander Runciman, the English artists Thomas Banks, George Romney and James Jefferys, the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel and the Danish painter Nicolas Abildgaard—all sometimes identified as members of a ‘Fuseli circle’.46

Fuseli would become a great innovator in applying this physicality and emotion to historical subjects, creating ultimately his distinctive method and fantastical style. The most compelling evidence for Wright’s connection to Fuseli at this point is their similar sketching technique, using ink washes to convey tonal variations in a manner that departs from Wright’s earlier, precise method. For example, Wright’s Study of a Man Seated (c. 1774, Derby Museum and Art Gallery) shows the artist using sepia wash to create tonal variety in the folds and wear patterns of the figure’s clothing as well as in the rock upon which he is seated.47 It is still quite precise, compared to Fuseli’s sometimes almost illogical application of washes in some of his drawings, but for Wright it is nearly reckless. The

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Derby artist had used washes to indicate tonal variation in some landscape sketches prior to traveling to Italy, but with very precise ends that enhanced and filled in the underdrawn structure created with pen, while his figural studies were almost exclusively line or chalk drawings without washes. Besides being figural, another difference in the 1774 sketch is that there appears to be little to no underdrawing beneath the wash areas. The wash is used independent of the pen in most cases, and where there is underdrawing, not only is it quite loose in its form, but it also fails to contain the wash, which oscillates in and out of its borders. It indicates a forceful spontaneity heretofore uncharacteristic of Wright’s art, but increasingly characteristic of Fuseli and the artists in his Roman circle, which included, according to Thomas Jones, Wright’s own pupil Richard Hurleston, who seems to have stayed behind in Rome after his master’s departure. Jones recounts meeting ‘Hurlestone’ and ‘Fuzeli’ in an English coffeehouse in Rome in the company Ozias Humphreys, John Robert Cozens, and several others on 27 November 1776.48 Another piece of compelling evidence suggesting that the artists were likely to have known one another is an event that occurs nearly a decade after Wright’s return from Italy, just prior to his having begun Corinthian Maid. Wright’s enthusiastic patron, Brooke Boothby hosted in the summer of 1783 an elaborate Milton-esque medieval pageant, which included the performance of a masque in verse, proclaiming Fuseli to be a great Magician/Wizard/Hero.49 The event was to be a surprise for Fuseli, the honored guest, and some of the others in attendance participated in the drama, too, including Anna Seward and Colonel St. George Mansergh St. George, on whose property the pageant was staged. That Fuseli’s visit to the Midlands area, to the Boothby/Lichfield Literary circle, occurred less than two years before Wright’s solo exhibition, just as he was beginning to paint Corinthian Maid, the first of the four paintings of tragic women exhibited in 1785, is surely no coincidence. Moreover, one of these paintings would take as its subject a Miltonian masque, “Comus.” Furthermore, Fuseli had already been a regular exhibiter with Wright at the newly formed Liverpool Society of Artists in the late 1770s and 1780s, where they both moved in the social and patronage circles surrounding William Roscoe, the Tate family, Daniel Daulby and John Leigh Philips. And, later, Fuseli would agree to illustrate part of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden, a commission that Wright would have certainly felt to be beneath his own talents, evidencing, I think, the different value that the two artists placed on commercial work. But the likelihood that the two had at least one chance meeting is certainly great under the circumstances and such contact may well help explain Wright’s move toward a more

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Romantic-Classical style after his return from Italy, and, in the 1780s, toward a body of literary sources more in keeping with the didactic demands of historical painting, particularly with what I have argued to be his mission of improving public virtue by affecting private sensibility.

Conclusion The sentiment of the virtuous Corinthian maiden, preparing for the departure of her lover by recording his presence in so melancholy a manner, was to affect the viewer’s sensibility in a similar way as with Penelope. Her virginal status as maiden makes her correlate to The Lady from Milton’s ‘Comus’, while the theme of the inevitable loss of one’s love is also common to Indian Widow and Penelope. That all four paintings were displayed together at Robins’s Rooms hints strongly at a programmatic message of sentiment and sensibility conveyed through the theme of the tragic woman in Wright’s art for the purpose of the moral improvement of the bourgeois viewer, which we have already seen in the artist’s paintings of characters from Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. The notion that fellow-feeling is a pleasurable, morally-uplifting experience conflates natural and moral philosophy. The conflation seems to come, in Wright’s case, directly from the writings of Adam Smith, David Hartley, and Thomas Reid, since their writings were known to the artist’s circle of friends and patrons, and not necessarily from aesthetic theorists like George Turnbull or the earl of Shaftesbury. The painter’s affiliation with the soon-to-be fellows of the DPS and his interest in such philosophical subjects had as much to do with his social class and status as a prosperous gentleman landowner, as with his artistic talent and interest in aesthetics, as I have continually stressed throughout this text. Moreover, the fact that Wedgwood, a prosperous businessman, owned the Corinthian Maid prior to its display at Robins’s Rooms may have to do with his desire to link his pottery trade to the fine arts in an attempt to market his newly-invented jasperware. Ann Bermingham has pointed out that this material was brittle and had an unpredictable success rate in production when compared to Wedgwood’s other staples, such as creamware. Therefore, she asserts, it warranted an ornamental function rather than a utilitarian one. The jasperware tablets with their blue grounds and white reliefs were marketed as “art” because they seemed to “transcend mere craft.”50 Wright’s painting may subsequently be seen as a pictorial justification for Wedgwood’s desire to link his craft not only with Pliny’s antiquity but also with the eighteenth-century conception of the fine arts; its elision of the origins of clay relief and painting as an attempt

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to elevate Wedgwood’s status from artisan/merchant to that of disinterested patrician. The fact that Wedgwood also purchased Penelope and The Lady from Comus suggests that the thematic content common to all three paintings may have also morally validated his social and economic upward mobility. Significantly, Judith Frank writes of sentimentalism as an economic strategy and ideology as follows: [S]entimentalism, with its doctrine of innate and spontaneous humanitarian benevolence, was ideologically central to the construction of the bourgeois subject. As an economic strategy, its paradigm of innate benevolence underwrote the laissez-faire individualism that, in the words of Mary Poovey, ‘gradually transformed England from a paternalistic hierarchy to a modern class society.’ As an ideology, sentimentalism created a bourgeois subject whose ‘feminized’ character marked him as distinct from and morally superior to the aristocracy.... as a justification for usurping the role of the aristocracy as England’s moral conscience.51

Therefore, the three paintings owned by Wedgwood, the exhibition at Robins’s Rooms, and Wright’s paintings from Sterne, all bound together by thematic and/or iconographic content, should be understood as an attempt to instill public virtue through the means of private sensibility. In much the same way as Wedgwood’s manufactures elided the fine and decorative arts, Wright’s exhibition, in a small private space open to the public (for a fee), created an environment that conflated public and private virtue, natural and moral philosophy. Wright’s paintings of tragic women, therefore, participated in a larger socio-cultural discourse of class that surrounded the rise of industrialization and the modern capitalist economy in late eighteenth-century Britain.

Notes 1 These paintings are: The Corinthian Maid (c. 1783-85, National Gallery, Washington, Paul Mellon Collection), Penelope, Unravelling Her Web by Lamplight (1785, J. Paul Getty Museum), The Lady from Milton’s Comus (1785, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), and The Indian Widow (1785, Derby Museum and Art Gallery). 2 This argument was first advanced in my doctoral thesis, “Art, Science and Enlightenment Ideology: Joseph Wright and the Derby Philosophical Society,” (University of Virginia, © 2002) and was briefly paraphrased without citation by John Bonehill in his excellent article on the same exhibition. See Bonehill, “Laying Siege to the Royal Academy: Wright of Derby’s View of Gibraltar at Robins’s Rooms, Covent Garden, April 1785,” Art History (September 2007), 537. The

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article was reprinted seemingly unchanged in Spectacle and Display, eds. Fintan Cullen and Deborah Cherry (Blackwell, 2008). 3 Catalogue of a Series of Pictures upon the Subject of Human Culture, Painted for the SOCIETY for the ENCOURAGEMENT of ARTS, MANUFACTURES, and COMMERCE; by JAMES BARRY, Royal Academician, Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy, and Member of the CLEMENTINE ACADEMY of BOLOGNA. John-Street, Adelphi, 1783. Bound within British Library shelfmark SC 1070, “Catalogues, Curios, Collections of Coins and Pictures, 1757-1786. 4 For a full discussion of the circumstances of Barry’s exhibition, see William Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), chapter 4, passim. Pressly writes that Barry was constantly “on the alert to protect himself from the machinations of the cabal which he imagined constantly threatened him.” (Pressly, 88) 5 For a recent and excellent study of Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, see Luisa Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford: Clarendon/ Oxford University Press, 2006). 6 My terminology comes from Wright’s friend and patron, Rev. Thomas Gisborne, who became a DPS member. See Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties, 574-75. 7 Wright hoped to open the show on April 16. See Nicolson, Joseph Wright, 16. 8 The Public Advertiser (June 1, 1785): “[George] Carter, as he justly deserves, and Wright of Derby as he very justly does not deserve…are losers on their experiments of separate exhibitions.” Quoted in Nicolson, Joseph Wright, 16. 9 The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser (April 13, 1785), front page: “[The] Eidouranion; Or, Large Transparent Orrery. On this Elaborate and Splendid Machine, which is Fifteen Feet Square, Mr. Walker, junior, will deliver his ASTRONOMICAL LECTURE, This Evening, being Wednesday the 13th …. Scene 1. Exhibits the earth in annual and diurnal motion: day, night, twilight, long and short days, in this scene, are [illegible] obvious, that a bare inspection of the machine explains the reasons of these phoenomena. Scene 2. Consists of the sun, the earth, and the moon: the intention is to shew the cause and effect of the moon’s Phases, or different appearances, her eclipses, and those of the sun. Scene 3. Shews the three-fold motion of the earth, viz. that on its axis, to produce day and night— that round the sun to produce the seasons—and that round the centre of gravity with the moon to produce spring and [illegible] tides. Scene 4. Exhibits every planet and satellite in annual and diurnal motion at once. A comet descends in the parabolic curve, from the top of the theatre, and turning round the sun ascends in like manner, its motions being accelerated and retarded according to the laws of planetary motion. Every motion in this complex variety, seems without cause or support. The sublime and awful simplicity of Nature is daringly imitated; and the Georgium Sidus, or new Planet, the appearance of the Fixed Stars, (and other recent discoveries made through a Telescope, magnifying 6,500 times, by Mr. Herschel, &c.) are all interwoven in this Lecture and Exhibition…. As the Celestina Step is a sister invention to the Eidouranion, some admired pieces will be introduced on that instrument, in the intervals of the Lecture.” See also W. Walker, An Account of the Eidouranion; Or, Transparent Orrery; Invented by A. Walker

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(Bury St. Edmunds: P. Gedge, 1793), 3-4: “This elaborate machine is 20 feet diameter; it stands vertical before the Spectators; and its globes are so large, that they are distinctly seen in the most distant part of a theatre. Every Planet and satellite seems suspended in space, without any support; performing it’s [sic.] annual and diurnal revolutions without any apparent cause. It is certainly the nearest approach to the magnificent simplicity of nature, and to its just proportion, of any Orrery yet made: and besides being a most brilliant and beautiful spectacle, conveys to the mind the most sublime instruction; rendering astronomical truths so plain and intelligible, that even those who have not so much as thought upon the subject, may acquire clear ideas of the laws, motions, appearances, eclipses, transits, influences, etc. of the planetary system.” 10 Ibid. (April 28, 1785), front page. The price of admission was 1s. De Loutherbourgh’s, Walker’s, and Wright’s exhibitions are all advertised on the same page. Ralph G. Allen writes that de Loutherbourg exhibited three versions of the Eidophusikon—in 1781, 1782, and 1786. See Allen, The Stage Spectacles of Philip James de Loutherbourg (D.F.A. dissertation, Yale University, 1960), chapter 12, pp. 303-320. The 1785 showing to which I refer must have been the third of four versions, previously unknown. Thomas Jervais was the Irish artist who worked in the medium of painted and stained glass. He executed a window at New College, Oxford, after a design by Sir Joshua Reynolds. 11 The stage was only about six by eight feet. Allen, 303. 12 Ibid., 306. 13 The Public Advertiser (April 27, 1785), 2: “The exhibition contains no less than six hundred and fifty different performances; a prodigious number, when it is considered that upwards of two hundred were refused admittance, and that several capital artists do no exhibit with the Royal Academy, viz. Mr. Wright, Mr. [Thomas] Gainsborough, Mr. [George] Romney, Mr. [George] Stubbs… &c. The first of these gentlemen (Mr. Wright) has opened an Exhibition, consisting entirely of his own works; they are but few in number, but in point of merit are such as do infinite credit to his abilities. In a certain line of his profession, and in certain lights, Mr. Wright of Derby is unrivalled; being in some respects superior to any artist either ancient or modern; no man has so happily represented the different effects of light, whether proceeding from the moon, fire or candle.” 14 Nicolson, Joseph Wright, 14: “A quarrel soon flared up [between 1781 and 83] but no-one has quite got to the bottom of the dispute.” 15 Wright to Francis Newton, Secretary of the Royal Academy, October 21, 1782. Collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. See also Barker, 101, letter 43. 16 Secretary Newton to Wright, November 8, 1782. Collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. 17 Pasquin, The Royal Academicians: A Farce (London: Denew and Grant, 1786), 41. 18 Wright, in a letter to the poet dated 1783, quoted in Nicolson, Joseph Wright, 15: “You have most agreeably anticipated a request I have often wished to make of you, of publishing and connecting your charming Ode wth. my small insignificant catalogue....” Apparently, however, this was never actually done.

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William Hayley, Ode to Mr. Wright of Derby (Chichester: Dennett Jacques, 1783), Stanza X. 20 Rosie Dias, “‘A world of pictures’: Pall Mall and the Topography of Display, 1780-99,” Georgian Geographies: Essays on Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Miles Ogborn and Charles W.J. Withers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 93. 21 Ibid., 93-96. 22 Bonehill, “Laying Siege to the Royal Academy,” passim. 23 I am referring of course to David Solkin, ed. Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780-1836 (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre, The Courtauld Institute, and Yale University Press, 2001); Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760-1840; as well as to Dias’s “‘A world of pictures’: Pall Mall and the Topography of Display, 1780-99.” 24 Wright, in a letter to the poet dated April 1784, quoted in Nicolson, “Two Companion Pieces by Wright of Derby,” Burlington Magazine (March 1962): 113. See also Barker, 111, letter 57. 25 Ibid., “Two Companion Pieces,” 113: “In fact, far from being true to life, the whole pose of his widow is taken over from the pose he used a few years earlier (1781) for his Maria ... only on this occasion he has forced himself to suppress his customary prudery by showing her bare breast.” 26 Theodore Crombie, “Wright of Derby’s Indian Widow,” Apollo (October 1959): 107. 27 Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, reprinted 1989), 39-43. 28 Ibid., 44-46. 29 Ibid., 44. 30 A Catalogue of Pictures, Painted by J. Wright, of Derby, and exhibited at Mr Robins’s Rooms, (late Langford’s) No. 9, under the Great Piazza, Covent Garden (Drury Lane: J. Barker, 1785), Derby Local Studies Library MSS 6301. Another copy is preserved at the Yale Center for British Art. 31 Ibid., op. cit. 32 Adair, as quoted in Honour, The European Vision of America (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975), cat. no. 184. 33 Wright to Hayley, quoted in Nicolson, “Two Companion Pieces,” 113, and in Egerton, 127. Wright exhibited the painting at Robins’s Rooms accompanied by these lines from Comus, which could also easily have applied to Indian Widow. It would be interesting to reconstruct the lay-out of the exhibition in order to confirm its programmatic nature. Mrs. Beridge’s husband was Dr. John Beridge, a physician and member of the Derby Philosophical Society. He was not only one of Wright’s patrons, but also a mutual friend of both the painter and William Hayley. Wright refers twice to “our friend Mr. Beridge” in a letter to Hayley, dated December 4, 1786, which is tipped in to William Bemrose’s copy of Bemrose, Life and Works (1888, collection of the Derby Museum and Art Gallery). See also Barker, 122, letter 73.

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34 John Milton, Comus, verse 221, reprinted in A Catalogue of Pictures, under picture number 1—i.e., The Lady in Milton’s Comus. 35 Milton, Comus, ed. A.W. Verity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 38. 36 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 41-42, Book II, lines 96-103. 37 A Catalogue of Pictures, under number XIV—i.e., Penelope, Unravelling Her Web. 38 This may have to do with an earlier passage in The Odyssey when Pallas Athene speaks to Telemachos: “How great your need is now of the absent Odysseus [Ulysses], who would lay his hands on these shameless suitors. I wish he could come now to stand in the outer doorway of his house, wearing a helmet and carrying a shield and two spears, the way he was the first time that ever I saw him.” Ibid., Book I, lines 253-257. Although he has neither helmet nor shield, and only one spear, his standing, authoritative spirit is nonetheless evoked. 39 Wedgwood wrote to his partner, Thomas Bentley, on May 5, 1778: “I am glad to hear Mr. Wright is in the land of the living, & continues to shine so gloriously in his profession. I should like to have a piece of this Gentlemans [sic.] Art, but think Debutade’s daughter would be a more apropos subject for me than the Alchymist though one principal reason for my having this subject would be a sin against the Costume I mean the introduction of our Vases into the piece for how could such fine things be supposed to exist in the earliest Infancy of the Potters Art.” Microfilm reel XII, 69, in the Wedgwood Archive at Keele University, Collection of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston. See also Bermingham, “Corinthian Maid,” 146. 40 Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” Art Bulletin (December 1957), 281. 41 Hayley, Essay on Painting, verse 126ff., reprinted in A Catalogue of Pictures, under number XIII—i.e, Corinthian Maid. 42 See Ann Bermingham, “Wright of Derby’s Corinthian Maid,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture, ed. John Barrell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 135-165. 43 Wedgwood to Wright, April 29, 1784, E26/18966. Collection of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston. 44 Wright to Wedgwood, December 31, 1783, 672-1. Collection of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston. See also Barker, 110, letter 55. 45 Martin Myrone, Henry Fuseli (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 18-19. 46 Ibid., 19. 47 The pen and sepia wash drawing is reproduced in Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby, vol. 2, page 91, plate 144. 48 “The Memoirs of Thomas Jones,” Walpole Society (vol. 32, 1946-1948), 53. 49 See Appendix D in the present volume. 50 For a discussion of Wright of Derby’s painting in relation to Wedgwood’s business see Bermingham, passim. 51 Frank, 98.

CODA

So far as is known, Joseph Wright was a member of neither the Lunar Society nor the Derby Philosophical Society. His personal connections to several participants in these groups existed in the unofficial, casual world of friendship and patronage, known to us by way of a limited amount of surviving correspondence and documentary evidence. This proves a very frustrating situation when trying to assess the painter’s intellectual concerns and knowledge. In lieu of copious primary evidence, Wright has often been evaluated as a historical figure on the basis of his paintings’ appearance and the artist’s primary residence in Derby. The problems inherent in the former are many. Art historians have traditionally and repeatedly focused their attention on the painter’s candlelight pictures of the 1760s, remarking on their hypernaturalism in the minutest detail, confounding of academic genres, and idiosyncratic use of out-dated tenebroso to depict such modern subject matter. The conclusion often drawn from both assessments is: It is little wonder he never became a full member of the Royal Academy of Arts and remained in the provincial obscurity of Derby for most of his life. When Wright’s portraits, landscapes and historical pictures are considered, it is too often assumed that he was opportunistically painting for those of unsophisticated taste and that his work was derivative/imitative of (and thus automatically of lesser art-historical importance than) that of other artists like Alexander and John Robert Cozens, George Romney, John Singleton Copley, Claude-Joseph Vernet and Pierre-Jacques Volaire, artists with whom he had much in common, admittedly. By looking more closely at the primary evidence related not only to Wright directly, but also to his known circle of friends and patrons, however, I have offered a different, more nuanced perspective. Presented as individual case studies, each chapter contains its own conclusion about the relationship among Wright’s art, social status, personal connections, moral and natural philosophies, and human and natural histories. The overarching theme, however, is that Wright chose to remain rooted in Derby and was as intellectually engaged as both his local peers and his academic painting competitors in London, and that his heretofore overlooked social status as a gentleman landlord compelled him to do the former while allowing him to be the latter. I believe, ultimately, that

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Wright was conscious of his role in Derbyshire society among its progressive luminaries and amid the nascent Industrial Revolution, as well as of his paintings’ functions in the realms of local and national pride. The most important thing my re-evaluation of Wright’s life and career (re)introduces is the reminder of his agency in making informed artistic, intellectual and personal choices. Wright decided to depict landscapes of mineralogical and geological significance in and around Derbyshire—this can be no coincidence. The pictures were choices that developed from an intellectual understanding and appreciation of the work of Wright’s friend, John Whitehurst, who attempted to make mining speculation more scientifically informed. The painter also demonstrated an intimate familiarity with Whitehurst’s macrocosmic theory of the origin of the planet when wishing for his friend’s company at Mt. Vesuvius. That Wright even ventured at all to see the volcano suggests a breadth of interest that extends beyond the role typically circumscribed for provincial painters, and more in keeping with an adventurous Grand Tourist of means. Similarly, Wright chose to discount heavily the price of paintings sold to his friends as a gesture of friendship and in a manner that shows money was not his motivation for painting, exhibiting or selling pictures. What mattered most to the painter was his reputation and the respect it commanded from others—a respect worthy of his social status as private gentleman. Such status and respect gave him much in common with his self-made and well-heeled patrons in and around Derby. While Brooke Boothby certainly had some input as to how he was to be depicted in Wright’s famous portrait of him, it was the artist who undoubtedly had final say in the creation of the image. At the very least, Boothby trusted and selected Wright to show him in a manner that was not only generally flattering to his likeness, but also rather highly focused on his intellectual interests. Wright could not have pulled this off so successfully and in such an intricate way, had he not been familiar with Boothby’s and Rousseau’s (and Darwin’s) ideological positions about Nature, botany and mankind. And although he conflicted with the Society of Artists of Great Britain and, later, the Royal Academy of Arts, it was always, in the end, Wright’s choice to part ways with these institutions. At the same time, however, his presence in Liverpool in the years leading to the foundation of the Liverpool Society of Artists presents an intriguing situation, which was the subject of a symposium and exhibition in that city in 2007.1 While these recent efforts have painted eighteenth-century Liverpool to be a wealthy city with a much more sophisticated appetite for art and culture than has

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previously been acknowledged, not much was made about Wright’s participation in the formation of that Merseyside area’s Society of Artists. This is perhaps because so little evidence has survived. But his timely departure from Liverpool at the moment of the society’s birth might simply indicate an intentional avoidance of diurnal institutional responsibility—a gentlemanly distance from the running of the organization itself—rather than a lack of ideological involvement in the formation and perpetuation of the group. Moreover, I have clearly demonstrated that Wright realized the didactic potential of his work and its exhibition. He chose to depict scenes from contemporary literature that portrayed women in ways meant to elicit a sympathetic response from the viewer. Later, he would use a similar approach to his depictions of more timeless heroines of ancient and mythological history. But he must soon have realized that the private nature of his work (and its ownership) did not suit his public objective—to create paintings whose emotional appeal would morally improve the viewers and, by extension, society at large. His desire to control the display, at least in part for didactic purpose, led him to mount his own show in London in 1785. Joseph Wright, Esq. was a painter, landowner, money-lender and gentleman who lived primarily in Derby among patrons, tenants, servants, family and friends who respected and regarded him highly. He had difficulty commanding the same respect in other places, especially in London, but insisted upon it nevertheless as a condition of his professional and personal reputation. When he felt mistreated, he became indignant and spiteful. He was intelligent, savvy and, at times, sickly, stubborn and curmudgeonly. He was, after all, a human being.

Notes 1

The exhibition, “Joseph Wright in Liverpool,” and accompanying symposium were originally hosted by the Walker Art Gallery and Merseyside Museums in Liverpool, respectively, in November 2007. The exhibition traveled to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut the following year. An exhibition catalogue was published in 2007 with the same title, edited by Alex Kidson and Elizabeth Barker.

Plate 1-1. Joseph Wright, John Whitehurst, FRS (1782). Private collection. Photograph courtesy of the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby.

Plate 1-2. Joseph Wright, Matlock Tor (c. 1778-1780). © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Plate 1-3. Joseph Wright, Rev. and Mrs. Thomas Gisborne (1786). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Plate 1-4. Joseph Wright, Convent in San Cosimato (1786). Private collection.

Plate 1-5. Joseph Wright, A View in Dovedale (1786). Private collection.

Plate 2-1. Joseph Wright, Self-portrait (c. 1780). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

Plate 2-2. Joseph Wright, Sir Richard Arkwright (1789). © Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby.

Plate 3-1. Joseph Wright, Sir Brooke Boothby, Bt. (1781). Tate Britain.

Plate 3-2. Sweet Violet (Viola odorata). Reproduced from William Woodville, MD, Medical Botany…. (London, 1742, reprinted 1791). Courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library.

Plate 4-1. Joseph Wright, An Experiment on a Bird in the Airpump (1768). © The National Gallery, London.

Plate 5-1. Joseph Wright, Penelope, Unravelling Her Web (1784). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Plate 5-2. Joseph Wright, Corinthian Maid (1783-1784). National Gallery, Washington, DC. Paul Mellon Collection.

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Wells, Roy A. The Rise and Development of Organised Freemasonry. London: Lewis Masonic, 1986. —. Understanding Freemasonry. London: Lewis Masonic, 1991. Willett, C. and Phillis Cunnington. Handbook of English Costume in the Eighteenth Century. London: Faber and Faber, no date. Williams, L. Pearce and Henry John Steffens, eds. The History of Science in Western Civilization: Volume II: The Scientific Revolution. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978. Wood, Andy. The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 15201770. New York, 1999.

Select Works Consulted and Suggestions for Further Reading Allan, D.G.C. and Abbott, John L. The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences: Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts. Athens (GA): University of Georgia Press, 1992. Anderson, R.G.W. and Christopher Lawrence, eds. Science, Medicine, and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). London: Wellcome Trust, 1987. Beck, Herbert, Peter C. Bol, and Maraike Bückling. Mehr Licht: Europa um 1770: Die Bildende Kunst der Aufklärung. München: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1999. Bindman, David. The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution. London: British Museum Publications, 1989. Bolton, Henry Carrington. “The Lunar Society, or, the Festive Philosophers of Birmingham One Hundred Years Ago Read Before the New York Academy of Sciences on May 7th, 1888,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences VII, no. 8 (May 1888): 3-20. Boothby, Sir Brooke. A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. London: J. Derbrett, 1791. —. Observations on the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, and On Mr. Paines’s Rights of Man: In Two Parts. London: John Stockdale, 1792. Boyer, John T., ed. The Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley. Washington: Barcroft Press, 1964. Clifton, Gloria. Directory of British Scientific Instrument Makers, 15501851. London: Zwemmer and the National Maritime Museum, 1995.

Joseph Wright, Esq Painter and Gentleman

147

Crowther, James Gerald. Scientists of the Industrial Revolution: Joseph Black, James Watt, Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish. London: Cresset Press, 1962. Cullen, Fintan. “Hugh Douglas Hamilton: ‘painter of the heart’.” Burlington Magazine. (July 1983): 417-421. Curley, Thomas M. “Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and the Tradition of Travel Literature,” in All Before Them: Volume One, 1660-1780. Atlantic Highlands (NJ): Ashfield Press, 1990, 203-216. Daumas, Maurice. Scientific Instruments of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, translated by Mary Holbrook. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972. Evans, D. Wyn, ed. The Lunar Society: An Exhibition in Connection with the Bicentenary Celebrations of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Birmingham: The Library of the University of Birmingham, 1966. Fletcher, Angus. The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton’s Comus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972. Fontaine, H. T. C. de la. “Benjamin Franklin,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum: Transactions of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge (41: 1929): 3-40. Garber, Elizabeth, ed. Beyond the History of Science: Essays in Honor of Robert E. Schofield. Bethlehem (PA): Lehigh University Press, 1990. Gilfillan, Rev. George. The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer with Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes. Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1854. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1973. Gordon, Catherine M. British Paintings of Subjects from the English Novel, 1740-1870. New York: Garland Publishing, 1988. Originally Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1981. Graciano, Andrew, “Shedding New Botanical Light on Joseph Wright’s Portrait of Brooke Boothby: Rousseauian Pleasure versus Medicinal Utility” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (3:2004), 365-380. —. “‘The Book of Nature is Open to All Men’: Geology, Mining and History in Joseph Wright’s Derbyshire Landscapes” The Huntington Library Quarterly (68: 4, 2005), 583-600. —, ed. Visualising the Unseen, Imagining the Unknown, Perfecting the Natural: Art and Science in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. Hamill, John. The Craft: A History of English Freemasonry. London: Antiquarian Press, 1986. Hassler, Donald M. The Comedian as the Letter D: Erasmus Darwin’s Comic Materialism. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.

148

Works Cited

Hiebert, Erwin N., Aaron J. Ihde, and Robert E. Schofield. Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Theologian, and Metaphysician: A Symposium Celebrating the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Discovery of Oxygen by Joseph Priestley in 1774. Edited by Lester Kieft and Bennett R. Willeford, Jr. London: Associated University Press, 1974. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Honour, Frances. The State of the Industrial Revolution in 1776. New York: Vantage Press, 1977. Isager, Jacob. Pliny on Art and Society: The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art. Odense (Denmark): Odense University Press, 1991. Kelly, Veronica and Von Mecke, Dorothea, eds. Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century. Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press, 1994. King, Everard. James Beattie. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977. King-Hele, Desmond. Erasmus Darwin. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964. —. Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Logan, James Venable. The Poetry and Aesthetics of Erasmus Darwin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936. MacMillan, Duncan. “Woman as Hero: Gavin Hamilton’s Radical Alternative,” in Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, eds. Gill Perry and Michael Rossington. New York: Manchester University Press, 1994, 78-98. McNeil, Maureen. Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age. Manchester (England): Manchester University Press, 1987. Michel, Henri. Scientific Instruments in Art and History. Translated by R. E. W. and Francis R. Maddison. New York: Viking Press, 1967. Miller, David Philip and Peter Hanns Reill, eds. Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mitchell, Timothy. Art and Science in German Landscape Painting, 17701840. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Moore, Cornelius. The Craftsman and Freemason’s Guide. Cincinnati: J. Ernst, 1866. Owen, William James. The Evolution of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1994. Robinson, Eric. “The Lunar Society: Its Membership and Organisation,” Transactions (35: 1963): 153-177.

Joseph Wright, Esq Painter and Gentleman

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Roll, Eric, Baron Roll of Ipsden. An Early Experiment in Industrial Organisation: Being a History of the Firm of Boulton and Watt, 17751805. London: Cass, 1968. Rosenblum, Robert. “Wright of Derby: Gothick Realist,” Art News (March 1960): 24-26, 54-55. Saito, Nobuyoshi. The Sense of a Middle: System and History in Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne. Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1994. Schofield, Robert E. The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. —. Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Schofield, Robert E., ed. A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 1966. Smiles, Sam. The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Smith, K. E. “Ordering Things in France: The Travels of Sterne, Tristram, and Yorick,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (292: 1991): 15-26. Stafford, Barbara. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Stephen, Sir Leslie and Lee, Sir Sidney, eds. “Boothby, Sir Brooke (17431824), 7th Baronet (1789).” The Dictionary of National Biography, Volume II. London: Oxford University Press, 1973: 853. Thomas, Tammis Elise. Eighteenth-Century Notions of Privacy: The Body in Tristram Shandy. Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1995. Thompson, Martyn P. “The Rise of the Social Sciences in Enlightenment Britain,” in State, Science and Modernization in England: From the Renaissance to the Present Time, ed. Jürgen Klein. New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1994, 141-163. Wallace, Miriam Latané. Challenging Gendered Subjects: Modern Feminism and the Alternate Subjectivity of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1993. Wedgwood, Barbara and Hensleigh. The Wedgwood Circle, 1730-1897: Four Generations of a Family and Their Friends. Westfield (NJ): Eastview Editions, Inc., 1980.

150

Works Cited

Wells, Roy A. Freemasonry in London from 1785. London: Lewis Masonic, 1984.

APPENDIX A MEMBERS OF THE DERBY PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Members from Derby: Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin, Pres. R. French [Dr.] J[ohn]. Beridge Dr. Pigot Mr. Darwin Mr. Fox Mr. J[oseph]. Strutt, Jr.1 Mr. Leaper Rev. Wm. Pickering Rev. Chas. Hope Dr. Crompton Mr. Hadley, Surgeon Mr. Hadon Mr. Fowler W[illiam].B[rookes]. Johnson Members from Outside Derby: B[rooke]. Boothby J. Trowell Mr. J[edediah]. Strutt Dr. White Dr. Buck Dr. Storer Dr. Arnold Dr. Bree 1

Although his given name was Joseph and not Jedediah, the suffix was, presumably, added to distinguish the younger “Mr. J. Strutt” from his father, whose name is recorded in exactly the same manner.

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Mr. Jackson Dr. Jones R. Archdall Mr. Crofts Rev. Mr. Wray Sir Robt. Wilmot Mr. Hunt Rev. Mr. Coke Mr. Stevenson Mr. Riddlesden Mr. Bent Dr. R[obert]. Darwin Mr. Beaumont Mr. Bage Chas. Hurt Dr. Wilson Fras. Bradshaw Josiah Wedgwood

Appendix A

APPENDIX B SELECT LISTING FROM THE DERBY PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY LIBRARY CATALOGUE

(Note: Numbers are accession numbers, corresponding to a handwritten ledger that was used to keep track of circulation. Listings are as printed, except for words in brackets.) Hutton, Dr. James’s philosophical dissertations, 305 Keir’s account of the life and writings of Thomas Day, 264 Lavoisier’s essays translated, 23 Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, 242 Lichfield Society’s families of plants from Linnaeus’s genera plantarum, 2 vols., 122 Lichfield Society’s system of vegetables, from Linnaeus, 2 vols, 138 Linnaean Zoology by Shaw, 254 Transactions of the Linnaean Society, 280 Linnaeus on the Study of Nature, Translated, 59 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 21 Pilkington’s View of the Present State of Derbyshire, 204 Rousseau’s Letters on the Elements of Botany, 50 Reid, Thomas, 52 Stewart, Dugald, 285 Translations of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 157 Boothby’s Reply to Burke, 250 [Archibald] Allison’s Essays on Taste, 233 Arnold on Insanity, 90 Gisborne’s Principles of Moral Philosophy, 201 Franklin’s Philosophical and Misc. Papers, 125 Whitehurst’s Inquiry, 2nd Edition, 70 Smith’s Wealth of Nations, 29 Mineralogie des Volcans par Faujas de St. Fond, 64

154

Appendix B

Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences à Paris, 13 [1779-1791, except 1790?] March 16, 1795 Supplement to Catalogue also includes: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 343 Baillie’s Morbid Anatomy, 354 Gisborne’s Enquiry in the Duties of Men, 365 Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 384

APPENDIX C GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Adit: a mine shaft driven horizontally into a hillside; sometimes called a level; occasionally functioning as a sough. ARA: Associate Royal Academician. Barmaster: presiding justice of the barmote court. Barmote (Barmoot) Court: judicial body that oversees the application, interpretation, and enforcement of mining laws and customs. Bing and Peasy: names given to the larger pieces of lead ore. Carding: the working of raw cotton between two hand-held “cards,” which were wooden blocks covered on one side with metal spikes. The carding machine mechanized this process using a spinning cylinder lined inside with similar spikes. Dish: colloquial name given to the trough-like vessel used to measure a standard unit of volumetric quantity of lead ore; approximately 36 dishes equals one British ton. DLSL: Derby Local Studies Library. DPS: Derby Philosophical Society. DRO: Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock. FLS: Fellow of the Linnean Society. Founder: the first shaft sunk to a vein; the beginning point of a mine complex.

156

Appendix C

FRCP: Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. FRS: Fellow of the Royal Society. Galena: lead sulphide (PbS). Lessee of the King’s Field (or Fee): a Lord of a Crown-owned liberty. Liberty: a mining district; there are about fifty liberties in Derbyshire with slightly varying laws and customs. Lord: the owner of a mineral liberty. Lot: the share of ore to which the Lord is entitled. Meer (Mear): a unit of measure of the length of a vein; approximately 28 yards. Pig of Lead: a large cast, brick-shaped ingot of lead. RA: Royal Academy of Arts. Rake: one of the main types of mineral veins; a vein in which the mineral deposits lay vertically and run for a mile or more. Smelting: the process by which metal is extracted from ore. Smitham: name given to smaller pieces of lead ore. Sough: an adit driven for the purpose of draining a mine of water. Vein: a mineral deposit encapsulated in rock. Ycleped: archaic term meaning “known as” or “called;” e.g., used by Geoffrey Chaucer.

APPENDIX D DESCRIPTION OF BOOTHBY’S PAGEANT TO HONOR FUSELI1

Mr. Boothby’s description of a Midnight & poetic Pageant continued & performed in Col: St. George’s woods this sumer 1783 at an emmense expence of Machinary &c to surprize & amuse the great Wizard Painter, Fuseley: who had no suspicion of ye scheme, so secret had been ye preparations. The rest of ye Company, which was not large, had their cue to keep back among ye trees, & not intererupt the solemn ceremonies. Mr. Boothby, having made a pretence to absent himself, Col: St. George propos’d to Fusely a walk after supper. “Armed at all points in compleat steel” Mr. Boothby meets them in the woods. Col: St. George slunk away, & left the Painter alone to the encounter, whom ye Knight accosts as a Magician, who was to aid him in feats of high emprize casting over him a Magician’s robe, & delivering to him a white wand, as he spoke ye following lines Come on! Come on! By Urma’s pows A Knight & lovely Dame Enthrall’d in you inchanted bows Our ling’ring prowess blame!

They pass on, & encounter three Fiends, who shake their tourches with an air of defiance. A Knight on ye part of Urma, engages ye virtuous Knight, & ye Magician pursue their way till they reach a Mausoleum, with large black plumes waving on its top. A labouring groan proceeds from its center than an hollow voice pronouncing these words Dar’st thou ye will of Fate to know, Take ye spades & dig below! Burst the Cerements of the ye Dead And fearless seize the armed Head! In the Helmit’s iron sound Shall a mystic scrowl be found.

158

Appendix D That ye will of Fate shall tell. Go on! & break th’accursed spell!

The adventurous Knight seizes the spade, & bursts the Mausoleum. He finds a skull in ye Helmet, inclosing a scrowl, which he reads by the light of ye sepulchral lamp. ‘Twas Urma wove the potent spell, In deep enchantment shall they dwell, And their iron sleep shall last Till twice three Hundred year are past. Till ye mighty Wizard come, Sprung from Fancy’s sacred womb, And ye Knight with daring arm, Ordain’d to break the tenfold charm! If the magic sword he gain; Else his prowess shall be vain.

Now again they pass forward, pursuing the sound of mournful shrieks till they reach a cavern, lit by a pale [illegible] flame, where they find a monster growling over his Prey, a bleeding Head grasp’d within his talons, which still as he seems to tear, he claps his black wings. Seeing the assailants he quits his Prey & couches between them, & the charmed sword, which hangs suspended from ye bough of a blasted Oak. The Monster springs upon ye Knight but after a fierce contest is subdued, & flies howling down ye Gulph. The virtuous Knight snatches the charmed sword. Thunder rolls, & Lightnings flash at the dissolution of Urma’s power. The Knight leads the Magician from this horrid scene. They pursue a pale light, which gleams from a neighbouring Cave in which they find a Knight & lovely Lady in deep sleep, recumbent on a marble monument above which a tall Elm waves; & from its highest bough a sable banner hangs trailing over their heads. The victorious Knight waves the magic Sword, won from ye Monster’s guard, over the sleeping Knight & Lady. They awake slowly from their long repose. He leads them from ye Cave of their rest into a Glade bright with the lustre of innumerable Lamps. There they are met by a troop of splendid Faries, who dancing sound ye valorous Knight & Magician crown them with laurel wreaths, singing the following words accompanied by flutes, play’d invisibly among the trees. Hail thee Valours favoured Son Now is past ye fateful hour Thou ye magic sword hast won That bursts Enchantment’s dreaded power

Description of Boothby’s Pageant to Honor Fuseli

159

Hail bright Fancy’s favour’d Child Born of Zurichs mountains will Whom thy immortal Mother bore High o’er ye Surge to Albions shore

At the conclusion of this strain a Fairy Form still more resplendent descends from an azure Cloud. The Sister Troop hail her as the Genius of Elegiac verse. As she descends, she sings the following Now shall these vocal Groves be dumb Their tuneful Echos mute remain Till my favourite Votary comes Bath’d in tears for Heros slain The Fairy Band then sing the following Invocation Lady of soft, & plaintive Lays To these shades O haste aalong The honor’d Dead have had their praise A living Hero asks thy song On thy much lov’d Andoe’s beir Trophies of thy friendship stand Wreaths that shall for ever bloom Wove by thy immortal hand. That Duty paid O Lady turn From his Laurel shaded Hearse! Nor o’er the cold insensate Urn Waste ye muses of thy verse! The Knight* who here requires thy lays Like that brave Youth for Britain fought And wears Alass! The shining bays Of Glory all too dearly bought. [* Col: St. George, who now lives with half his head shot away—but it is in pain & feebleness, Yet his Imagination & his virtue are in their full vigour. These last Stanzas were conceal’d from him till ye moment of their utterance his having said this should be ye last fanciful business performed in that Grove till Miss Seward came thither gave ye [illegible—Windsor?] ye appearance of ye Elegiac Muse.]

160

Appendix D Since rosy Health, with all her train Of joys, that sound ye youthful glow, Deep drench’d in blood, among the Slain Fell victims at one fatal blow! To the simple Reed’s soft measures Sing we the Virtues of his mind Where Other’s sorrows, Others pleasures Sympathizing feelings find. Lady, to thy nobler strains The theme of Conquest we resign When Slaughter on ye hostile plains Ravages ye broken Line. ‘Tis thine to paint ye Battles sage ‘Tis thine to trace the flying Foe And bid thy animated page With all a Poet’s ardour glow! With daring Hand assume the Lyre Bright Leader of ye tuneful Choir Haste O Lady! Haste along And join with ours thy bolder song.

This sung ye Faries vanish’d among the trees, & ye Pageant concluded. Mr. Boothby declares all these things were faithfully represented & sung. Miss Ryves composed the Poetry on ye occasion. She has been patronized by the Mr. Mason as well as by Col: St. George.

Notes 1

British Library Add. MS 61842, fols. 164 verso – 166 verso. Bound with other selections of verse, handwritten extracts from published works on literature and philosophy, and a few newspaper clippings about literary figures—mostly obituaries. At the front of the volume there is a bookplate, attached to a 19thcentury binding, that says “Ex Libris Jos. Coltman”