Page 47 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

Fig. 9. JOSEPH WRIGHT, The Iron ForgeViewed from Without. Hermitage Museum,
Leningrad.
The men in these scenes of blacksmiths and iron-
forgers are labourers developing new technologies
for the industrial age, yet they are also artists prac-
tising an ancient craft. The iron and coal they work
with come from deep within the earth, and their
labour is a demonstration of men’s attempted mas-
tery of the powers of nature – the heat of the forge,
the gravity that drags down the thundering hammers.
The balance of potential chaos against the control of
long-learned skill is ever present. This tension
looks back to Wright’s famous paintings of the mid-
1760s, A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in The tomb is a tribute to the power of inspiration from
which a Lamp is put in place of the Sun, and Experiment
on a Bird in an Air Pump.20 In both, as in the scenes of
the forges and in Virgil’s Tomb, their reasoning
powers of men, their experimental drive and tech-
nical skill are lit by lamps, while the untamed moon
floats on outside. But while A Philosopher conveys the
harmony of Newtonian physics, with the planets
spinning in their courses, the Experiment is a vision of
potential terror. Here the children do not smile but
hide their faces in fear, as the air is sucked out of the
pump and the cockatoo flutters in the vacuum: this
is a demonstration not of the laws of nature but of
the delicate physical balance of life and death, a study
of physical force.
In Virgil’sTomb that force is the poetic genius, burning
from within, bursting through the crust of history,
like the glowing lava inWright’s paintings ofVesuvius.
the past. Seen in these terms,Wright’s painting takes
20. A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a Lamp is put in
place of the Sun,1766, Derby Art Gallery, and An Experiment on a
Bird in an Air Pump, 1768,National Gallery London. Egerton
op.cit. cat. 21.
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