Page 64 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

Fig. 26. JOSEPH WRIGHT, Iron ForgeViewed fromWithout, 1773, oil on canvas.The State Hermitage
Museum, St. Petersburg.

V irgil’s Tomb of 1779 marked a crucial transition elements – such as the moonlit sky, a light-filled in-
betweenWright’s early subject pictures and his terior, and a ruinous structure (see, for example,
later landscapes characterized by picturesque motifs Fig. 26) – into a more realistic environment.As a re-
and evocative settings. He integrated many previous sult there was a shift away from the creation of a
somewhat mysterious and eerie atmosphere toward
29. Although Wright would not have known Denis Diderot’s the construction of a more dramatic and natural
unpublished commentary of 1767 regarding Hubert Robert’s scene. In this case the standard devices were supple-
pictures of ruins, his incisive observations are worth citing: ‘Don’t mented with the inclusion of a solitary figure dressed
you sense there are too many figures, that three-quarters of them should be in ancient clothing, and assembled into a recogniz-
removed? Only those enhancing the effect of solitude and silence should able site in Italy, in order to produce a poetic vision
be retained.A solitary man who has wandered into these shadowy of the classical past.29
precincts, his arms across his chest and his head inclined, would have made
a greater impression on me’(cited in English in Diderot on Art, ed. and Wright intentionally chose an iconic monument
trans. John Goodman, 2 vols., New Haven and London, 1995,Vol. that had long attracted the attention of foreign visit-
II, p. 198).

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