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  • Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool
  • Martha Hamilton-Phillips
Elisabeth E. Barker and Alex Kidson. Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool (New Haven: Yale Univ., 2008). Pp. xii + 216. 204 ills. $75. ISBN 978-0-300-11745-5.1

This splendid publication and the exhibition it accompanied were planned to coincide with the eight-hundredth anniversary of the charter of the city of Liverpool in 2007, and with Liverpool’s designation as European Capital of Culture in 2008. They were also scheduled to mark the fortieth anniversary of the late Benedict Nicholson’s landmark catalogue raisonné Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Light, published for the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art in 1968.

Joseph Wright (1734–97) came from Derby and earned contemporary admiration for both his evocative “candlelight” subject paintings and his distinguished portraits. In time, he has become one of the most admired and fascinating British artists of the eighteenth century. More than forty of Wright’s paintings and drawings were featured in the exhibition, which provided a rich historical and visual context for his creative development as a young man (age thirty-four to thirty-seven), who was already an acclaimed artist.

The book provides a lasting record of that brief but critical period 1768–71, when Wright chose to leave his native Derby to pursue his career in Liverpool, Britain’s thriving west-coast seaport. There he acquired new patrons [End Page 106] and fascinating friends, while exploring new techniques and ideas in his art. Although his sojourn in Liverpool was brief, it took place at a seminal moment in the city’s cultural growth, so Wright was in the right place at the right time to make a significant impact on the artistic life of the city, and Liverpool, in turn, provided a fertile milieu where Wright could hone his artistic and marketing skills.

While showcasing Wright, the cocurators Elizabeth Barker and Alex Kidson created a contextual exhibition that illuminated the eighteenth-century character of Liverpool. The exhibition opened, as the catalog does, therefore, with some seldom-seen views of Liverpool: a large-scale, engraved map of the city from George Perry’s 1769 Plan of Liverpool, and panoramic, watercolor views of the port along the river Mersey, painted by Michael Angelo Rooker in 1769.

The first essay in the book, contributed by Jane Longmore, insightfully explores what she calls the “Urban Renaissance” in Liverpool, from 1760 to 1800. Her meticulous research, augmented by engravings from the Liverpool Record Office, reconstructs Liverpool’s meteoric growth as a port, the demographics of its population, and the expansion of its transatlantic commerce to include not only goods such as salt, tobacco, sugar, and rum, but also the notorious but profitable slave trade.

The growing wealth and prospective art patronage in Liverpool helped attract Wright to set up his portrait studio there, where he readily obtained scores of commissions. His patrons included merchants, some of whose wealth accrued from the slave trade, but who also aspired to civic virtue and cultural “politeness.” New clubs, pleasure gardens, and civic improvements catered to those aspirations, and the Liverpool Library, established in 1758, encouraged Liverpool’s intellectual growth and enlightenment thought. Wright had been in town for less than a year when his friend Peter Perez Burdett (1734/35–93) helped found the first “Society for the Protection and Encouragement of Arts of Painting and Design in Liverpool.”

In the second essay, Alex Kidson describes the establishment of this artist’s society in 1769 as “a defining moment in the culture of Liverpool.” Writing about the Liverpool art scene from 1745 to 1770, he suggests that it was hardly a coincidence that the society was founded so soon after Wright arrived. The painter was already celebrated for his subject picture, Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which had been exhibited in London in 1768, but had not found a buyer. The Royal Academy was established in London towards the end of 1768, but had not included Wright of Derby (who had already departed for Liverpool) among its founding members. The original Liverpool Society of Artists had its ups and downs (being dissolved in 1770, revived in 1773), but...

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