WRIGHT, Joseph
(b. 1734, Derby, d. 1797, Derby)

An Academy by Lamplight

1769
Oil on canvas, 127 x 102 cm
Private collection

This painting is one of a small number of important early candlelit subject paintings, all of which were painted in the late 1760s and early 1770s before he travelled to Italy, which both established the artist's contemporary celebrity and for which he is most famous today.

The painting depicts six young draughtsmen, in various stages of adolescence, grouped around an antique marble statue known as the Borghese Nymph with a Shell, which dominates the composition. A first century Roman marble that was rediscovered during the Renaissance, it was much admired in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Wright's day the original was housed at the Villa Borghese, in Rome, and it is now in the Louvre. In the early 1730s a marble copy of the statue was brought to England from Rome by the sculptor Peter Scheemakers, and it may be this that served as the model for Wright's painting. A symbol of carefree childhood and a model of idealised beauty, it was heavily influential on artists across Europe.

The scene is dramatically lit by a single oil lamp, hidden from view behind the red drape that hangs down in the upper left of the composition. Its warm glow illuminates the statue, lending an almost warm fleshiness and a soft sensuality to the cold marble, whilst also picking out the ruddy features of the students themselves and throwing them into high relief.

There is another version, painted c. 1769, which has a number of significant changes to the composition. It is now in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.