Thomas Day: Portrait of a Gentleman

Thomas Day by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1770.¹

The visual narrative of Joseph Wright’s figures is eloquent and complex. In many ways, the sitters were able to define themselves and their cultural aspirations for posterity through clothing, posture, and props. Wright (1734–1797) often subverted the tenets of eighteenth-century portraiture when attempting to identify the physical markers that create an iconography. The painting of the writer and political campaigner Thomas Day, for example, is far removed from the conventional portraiture of a wealthy gentleman. Although formally presented, here stands a figure with a melancholy gaze wearing the plain clothes associated with the cult of sensibility and posing in a neo-classical setting with a well-worn manuscript in his hand. The viewer can easily identify the markers of a sensitive, literary figure, yet, beyond that, the iconography is both ambiguous and intriguing. Marcia Pointon has noted that eighteenth-century portraits are part of a symbolic structure: “the subject of the portrait participates in the production of meanings that are not defined by reference to standards of likeness” (112). In effect, the artifacts in the painting are more important to its context than is the physical resemblance to the sitter. Wright’s composition is also defined by its setting, an outdoor space with an unusually turbulent atmosphere, rather than his customary domestic or pastoral environments.

What was Wright’s rationale for this depiction of Day? A close examination of the painting can suggest a complex and obscure narrative. Moreover, when this visual image is read alongside life writings and unpublished letters, the disconnected physical markers in the painting align with the written word to give us recourse to what Marcia Pointon calls the “discursive field in which the relations, the networks of definition” can be recognized (54). In 1804, the Lichfield poet and letter writer Anna Seward, who knew Thomas Day well, published revelatory biographical anecdotes about him that elucidate the symbols and markers behind Wright’s constructed image. In this essay I hope to give a fresh interpretation of the portrait of Thomas Day, exploring the synthesis of Wright’s painting and Seward’s word-painting.

As a distinguished author, philosopher, political campaigner, and aspirer to Stoic standards, Thomas Day was a respected figure linked to Enlightenment thinking. His most popular work was the didactic children’s book, The History of Sandford and Merton (1784), which deploys Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophies of education in a tale of two boys; one cruel and greedy, spoiled by a wealthy upbringing, and the other with an uncorrupted disposition of natural virtue. Perhaps more politically influential was his sentimental but powerful poem “The Dying Negro” (1773), a potent support for the abolitionists’ cause and the first poem which, as The Gentleman’s Magazine reported, “called the attention of the public to the miseries inflicted on that abused race” (977). In terms of biographical representations, most of what was known of Day was upended with the revelations of his intriguing personal circumstances by Anna Seward in her unorthodox biography of Erasmus Darwin and his circle, Memoirs of the Life of Dr Darwin chiefly during his residence in Lichfield, with anecdotes of his friends and criticisms of his writings (1804). Day was one of Darwin’s “friends” of the title, and Seward’s anecdotes create a word-painting of a misanthropic ascetic as she brings to light details of his personal history. Other, more conventional accounts of his achievements included a “Great-Man” biography, an account of Day’s life and writings published in 1791 by his close friend and fellow “Lunar Man,” the Scottish chemist James Keir. Later biographies include John Blackman’s 1862 memoirs, an overdramatic account which relies heavily on Seward’s anecdotes for its material. Underpinning these life histories are unpublished familiar letters that indicate the complexities of Day’s life.

The artist Joseph Wright of Derby, whose paintings tend to explore the relation between the hybrid genres of art and philosophy, recorded Day’s visual image for posterity. Wright is best known for his vivid representation...