Overview

A revelatory study of one of the 18th century’s greatest artists, which places him in relation to the darker side of the English Enlightenment Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797), though conventionally known as a ‘painter of light’, returned repeatedly to nocturnal images. His essential preoccupations were dark and melancholy, and he had an enduring concern with death, ruin, old age, loss of innocence, isolation and tragedy. In this long-awaited book, Matthew Craske adopts a fresh approach to Wright, which takes seriously contemporary reports of his melancholia and nervous disposition, and goes on to question accepted understandings of the artist. Long seen as a quintessentially modern and progressive figure – one of the artistic icons of the English Enlightenment – Craske overturns this traditional view of the artist. He demonstrates the extent to which Wright, rather than being a spokesman for scientific progress, was actually a melancholic and sceptical outsider, who increasingly retreated into a solitary, rural world of philosophical and poetic reflection, and whose artistic vision was correspondingly dark and meditative. Craske offers a succession of new and powerful interpretations of the artist’s paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces. In doing so, he recovers Wright’s deep engagement with the landscape, with the pleasures and sufferings of solitude, and with the themes of time, history and mortality. In this book, Joseph Wright of Derby emerges not only as one of Britain’s most ambitious and innovative artists, but also as one of its most profound. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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9781913107123

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Reviews

Matthew Craske's fascinating biography of Joseph Wright looks afresh at the artist known as the 'painter of light' [and] provides an alternative reading of this 'self-professed melancholic', drawing on neglected sources to mine the motivations and forces behind the creation of Wright's oeuvre...Craske's ambitious and innovative book invites the reader to reconsider this melancholy mind, this painter of darkness. -Emily Knight, Apollo Magazine In this beautifully illustrated new book Matthew Craske overturns this view of the artist as a spokesman for scientific progress and reveals him to be someone very different. -ArtMag [Joseph Wright's] most famous works show experiments and create the sense of wonder that must have accompanied them. He was much more than that, though, and this magnificently thorough biography and analysis includes a wide range of other figurative and landscape works. -Henry Malt, Artbookreview.net

Author Information

Matthew Craske is reader in art history at Oxford Brookes University.

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