Animal Experimentation in 18th-Century Art: Joseph Wright of Derby: An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump

Despite Robert Boyle’s enthusiasm as a leading chemist in the early years of the Royal Society, his experiments on animals raised acute moral and theological issues in regard to animal suffering. Many years after Boyle’s experiments in the scientific field of pneumatics, Joseph Wright of Derby painted a complex representation of Boyle’s early experiment called An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump. I use an art historical methodology to resituate Wright’s imagined painting of group performance as a microcosm of 18th-century morality against the backdrop of Boyle’s profound eschatological beliefs and earlier discourse on animal ethics.