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Liverpool honours work of Derby artist Joseph Wright
Former Derbeian Peter Saunders was proud to discover that an exhibition of works by Derby’s own Joseph Wright was being staged in Liverpool at the launch of the city’s year as European Capital of Culture, the artist being attributed with transforming Liverpool “from an artistic backwater” – as Peter, left, now living on The Wirral, describes here.
This is the title of a major art exhibition, arranged as a joint venture between National Museums Liverpool and the Yale Centre of British Art in the United States, staged at the start of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture 2008.
It focuses on the three important years (1768-71) which Joseph Wright spent in Liverpool, then growing into a major world port, where he found new and exciting opportunities to develop and market his work.
Although, surprisingly, he had been excluded from the Royal Academy, Joseph Wright found influential patrons in Liverpool’s burgeoning mercantile, trading and professional classes and was soon completing superb portraits every nine or 10 days. Some of the names of his wealthy patrons are enshrined in today’s street names in Liverpool.
Wright’s painting technique made many advances during the three years when he lived in lodgings in Duke Street, Liverpool. It seems he quickly saw off the competition from local artists. Surrounded as I am by soccer-crazy Scousers, how I wish today’s Derby County could achieve a similar result.
Growing up in the Derby of the 1940s and 50s, I studied Joseph Wright’s work in the art gallery in the Wardwick and felt he was “something special”, though I would be the first to concede that I had visited only one other art gallery – in Nottingham – and was not exactly an expert.
It was much later that Wright belatedly achieved recognition as a truly significant figure in the art of late-18th-century Europe.
Apart from showcasing his work and his patrons, a secondary theme of the exhibition is the influence of Joseph Wright’s presence on the Liverpool cultural scene of the 1770s, when the booming port and commercial centre was second in importance to London.
Burdett (1734-1793) was a surveyor, cartographer, printmaker and draughtsman – a colourful character but somewhat financially insecure man of business. Wright paints him sitting and holding a telescope, which presumably he would have used in map-making, with his wife standing by his side holding a spray of white hawthorn, the fabric of her expensive silk gown, with its fine lace trimmings, most beautifully painted.
According to Maxwell Craven’s book Derbeians of Distinction, the rural background of this splendid double-portrait is an obscure corner of the Foremark Hall estate. Craven reveals that, during his time in Derby, Burdett lived in a house in Full Street rebuilt for him by his friend, the distinguished Derby architect Joseph Pickford.
Burdett, famed for his county maps, had lost money on the four-year survey he did for his prize-winning Derbyshire map, a venture which his friend, Wright, helped support with a substantial loan.
He moved to Liverpool with Wright to work on the mapping of Lancashire and Cheshire, and became the first president of the Liverpool Society of Artists.
However, in 1774, he did “a moonlight flit” from Liverpool to the continent to escape his creditors, leaving his wife in poverty.
I have seen his Cheshire map and thought it looked very detailed and surprisingly accurate for its time, bearing in mind it was surveyed some years before the first Ordnance Survey maps were published.
As a newspaper reporter many years ago, I once covered a court case in which Burdett’s map of Cheshire was produced as evidence on a point of highway law.
The Burdett double-portrait is flanked by Wright’s superb portrait of a remarkable 18th-century Liverpool businesswoman, Sarah Clayton, a wealthy coal entrepreneur and important land developer in the thriving seaport. She gave her name to the city’s Clayton Square.
Several of Wright’s patrons had links with the transatlantic slave trade, which was an important factor in Liverpool’s development.
I had not previously seen Wright’s painting, A Conversation of Girls, which is in a private collection but on loan to the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, and was intrigued by this study of two white girls decorating an urn with flowers proffered by a kneeling black child.
It is described as the artist’s most explicit reference to the Liverpool slave trade, completed more than a decade before an organised abolition movement got under way. Wright may have noticed black servants during his time in Liverpool.
The exhibition includes two versions of Wright’s famous A Blacksmith’s Shop, masterpieces of the artist’s Liverpool period, one of them from the Paul Mellon collection at Yale, the other from Derby Art Gallery.
The latter has also loaned another Wright masterpiece, The Alchymist, in which the artist completed a celebrated trio of paintings of scientific subjects illustrating astronomy (A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery), physics (An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump) and chemistry.
It would have been nice to report that I heard a friendly Derby accent on my visit to the exhibition but, sadly, I did not.
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