Page 38 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.
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Measureles s Caverns:
Joseph Wright and Vi rgi l’s Tomb
osephWright’s Virgil’sTomb is a key early Roman- very salutary, and would, I think, perfectly restore me, was
not my attention and application continually engaged with
J tic painting.Yet Wright visited Naples in 1774, the amazing and stupendous remains of antiquity’.1 When
a full generation before the emergence of a dis- he looked at the buildings and monuments all around
tinct Romantic movement in literature and art. him, he added, ‘I cannot help reflecting how trifling and
In what sense then can this work be called Romantic? insignificant are the present operations of mankind; we are
The link comes, I believe, from the way that inWright’s no better than infants, and ought to wear dandling strings.’
work the eighteenth-century concern with the classic- In the month that he spent around Naples that autumn
al heritage and the picturesque fused with a new fas- he sketched constantly. But while he was impressed
cination with the story of the earth itself. Wright’s by the great excavations at Pompeii and Hercula-
interest in the mysteries of geology and science - seen neum, he was equally enthralled by the volcano that
in his interest in strata and caves, and in his preoccupa- had destroyed them. In November, he asked his
tion with light - are here applied to evoke the deep, brother Richard ‘when you see Whitehurst, tell him I
underground powers of the poetic imagination. wished for his company, when on Mount Vesuvius. His
thoughts would have centr’d in the bowels of the mountain,
As BartonThurber has shown in the succeeding essay, mine skimmed over the surface only;there was a very consid-
in his time in Italy from 1773-75Wright followed the erable eruption at the time, of which I am going to make a
traditional Grand Tour itinerary. He was thrilled by picture. Tis the most wonderful sight in nature’.2
the pure and clear Italian atmosphere, and by the He kept his word: on his return he painted around
scenery and the antiquities. Recovering from illness thirty versions of the explosion, flaming against dark
in 1774, he told his sister Nancy: ‘The climate is certainly skies, reddening the clouds and the sea.
1. Letter to Nancy 22 May 1774, quoted in Benedict Nicholson, lll
JosephWright of Derby: Painter of Light, London, 1968,Vol I, p. 8 .
W illiam Whitehurst, his Derby neighbour and
2. Joseph Wright to Richard Wright, 11 November 1774,William friend, a clockmaker and pioneering geolo-
Bemrose, The Life andWorks of JosephWright, commonly called ‘Wright gist, had been studying the strata of Derbyshire for
of Derby’, London & Derby, 1885, pp. 34-5. For paintings of
Vesuvius see Judy Egerton, Wright of Derby, exhibition catalogue,
Tate Gallery London, 1990.
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