Monday, May 15, 2017

Portraits and Night Scenes by Joseph Wright of Derby

Joseph Wright of Derby
Matlock Tor by Moonlight
ca. 1777-80
oil on canvas
Yale Center for British Art

Joseph Wright of Derby
Portrait of Fleetwood Hesketh
1769
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Joseph Wright of Derby
Dovedale by Moonlight
ca. 1785
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Joseph Wright of Derby
Portrait of Mrs Frances Hesketh
1769
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

"If art really strove to imitate nature, the matter would be quite simple.  The artist would merely cast the object in plaster, and paint its outer surfaces to correspond to nature.  A person could then view the object in the closest proximity or from a distance, however he wished, and he would receive a plastic or a painterly impression.  However, visual art is not an imitation of nature but a contest with it.  The artist wants to present only those aspects of a natural thing that will be pleasing to us.  These have changed dramatically through various times and cultures.  In some times, people preferred to see things at close range, in others  today, for example  from a distance.  This development constitutes a substantial chapter in the history of art, one no less significant than the development of motifs.  In the end, the former depends just as heavily as the latter on the sequence of men's worldviews."

 from Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, a course of lectures delivered by Aloïs Riegl in 1899 at the University of Vienna, translated by Jaqueline E. Jung and published in English by Zone Books in 2004

Riegl talks about the 'sequence' of worldviews through 'various' times and cultures in order to avoid using words like 'succession' and 'progress.'  His contemporaries of course mostly accepted the popular fantasies of their day – including 'the march of history' (in one direction only) along a meaningful linear path. Riegl was skeptical of this model, suggesting that taste-cycles (like other temporal cycles) could occur independently and arbitrarily.

Joseph Wright of Derby
Eruption of Vesuvius with view over the islands in the Bay of Naples
ca. 1776
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

Joseph Wright of Derby
Portrait of Richard Gildart
17668
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Joseph Wright of Derby
View of erupting Vesuvius from Posillipo, Naples
ca. 1788-90
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Joseph Wright of Derby
Portrait of a man
ca. 1755-65
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Joseph Wright of Derby
Iron Forge viewed from without
1773
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Joseph Wright of Derby
Portrait of a man
ca. 1768
pastel
Yale Center for British Art

Joseph Wright of Derby
Annual Girandola at Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome
ca. 1775-76
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Joseph Wright of Derby
Self-portrait in fur cap
1765
pastel
Art Institute of Chicago

Joseph Wright of Derby
Self-portrait
ca. 1765-69
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Joseph Wright of Derby
Lake by Moonlight
ca. 1780-82
oil on canvas
Yale Center for British Art