An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump - Joseph Wright, 1768

This stunning painting depicts a natural philosopher, a forerunner of the modern scientist, recreating one of Robert Boyle's air pump experiments, in which a bird is deprived of air, before a varied group of onlookers. The group exhibits a variety of reactions, but for most of the audience scientific curiosity overcomes concern for the bird. The central figure looks out of the picture as if inviting the viewer's participation in the outcome.

The piece rewards closer study. The experiment itself and the setting in which it takes place are the main attractor but the people surrounding it provide an enormous amount of context. Their faces are positively dripping with emotion. Wright has each of them tell a story, each highlighting a different facet of man's evolving relationship with early science. The scared look on the little girl's face, the lovers who have no interest in anything but each other, the somewhat mysterious boy in the background (is he lowering or raising the cage or is he perhaps lowering the curtains, afraid of the outside world's reaction to man trying to unravel the mysteries of nature?) Subtext everywhere.

The politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), tied natural philosophers to the French Revolution; he later wrote in his Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) that radicals who supported science in Britain "considered man in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump". In light of this comment, Wright's painting of the bird in the air pump, completed over twenty years earlier, seems particularly prescient.

Wright's phenomenal paintings caused a great stir at their time of creation for they replaced the traditional classical subject with one of a scientific nature . Wright's depiction of the awe produced by scientific "miracles" marked a break with traditions in which the artistic depiction of such wonder was reserved for religious events. To Wright the marvels of the technological age were as awe-inspiring as the subjects of the great religious paintings.

Joseph Wright (1734 - 1797) has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution". He is notable for his use of Chiaroscuro effect, which emphasizes the contrast of light and dark, and for his paintings of candle-lit subjects. His paintings of the birth of science out of alchemy, often based on the meetings of the Lunar Society, a group of very influential scientists and industrialists living in the English Midlands, are a significant record of the struggle of science against religious values in the period known as the Age of Enlightenment.

Other amazing works of his include;
> A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery
http://www.marketingderby.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Joseph-Wright-The-Orrery.jpg
> The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone
http://www.derbymuseums.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Hero_WhatsOn.jpg
> An Iron Forge
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Joseph_Wright_-_An_Iron_Forge_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
> Vesuvius from Portici
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Joseph_Wright_of_Derby_-_Vesuvius_from_Portici.jpg

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Wright_of_Derby
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_on_a_Bird_in_the_Air_Pump

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

Albert Bierstadt's unnatural second nature

Born in Germany in 1830, Albert Bierstadt was brought to the United States at the age of one by his parents. He developed a taste for art early and made clever crayon sketches in his youth. On his twentieth birthday, he began to paint in oils. After a trip to Germany where he studied painting for several years he returned to the US where in 1858 he began painting scenes in New England and upstate New York, including in the Hudson River valley.

In 1860 he was elected a member of the National Academy; he received medals in Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and Germany. During the American Civil War, Bierstadt paid for a substitute to serve in his place when he was drafted in 1863.

Throughout the 1860s, Bierstadt used studies from his many westward travels as the source for large-scale paintings for exhibition. He continued to visit the American West throughout his career. In 1867 he traveled to London, where he exhibited two landscape paintings in a private reception with Queen Victoria.

A trip to the Yellowstone region in 1871 yielded numerous drawings of the area's geysers and picturesque topography. These works were instrumental in convincing the United States Congress to pass the Yellowstone Park Bill in 1872, thus establishing the first national park in the world.

Despite his popular success, Bierstadt was criticized by some contemporaries for the romanticism evident in his choices of subject and his use of light was felt to be excessive. His exhibition pieces were brilliantly crafted images that glorified the American West as a land of promise.

In 1882 Bierstadt's studio at Irvington, New York, was destroyed by fire, resulting in the loss of many of his paintings. By the time of his death in 1902, the taste for epic landscape painting had long since subsided. Bierstadt was then largely forgotten.

"In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous." -Aristotle