darwin — Blog posts analysing famous paintings.

Wrights and Wrongs

If you read my post on Velazquez’ Bacchus, you might recall that one figure stares cheerfully out at us, while others within the arrangement are more contained. I pointed out how the device draws us into the scene. This got me thinking about similarly constructed works where a single character within a small crowd locks eyes with us to involve us in the group’s experience. Perhaps, I thought, I should have a look at another. This lavish expedition into light, shade and colour was the candidate that sprang to mind more or less instantly. But unlike the Velasquez where we’re asked to join in and drink deep, this piece poses a bit more of a challenge. Let’s have a look.

Here’s the chap doing the staring. A bit manic, it has to be said. Big hair, liddy eyes, loose lips, wrinkled brow. There’s something unsettling about this bloke. He has a peculiar vibe. Probably not the guy you want to get cornered by at a standing up social event like a barbecue or drinks party. It doesn’t help that he appears to have arrived at this evening’s get-together in a dressing gown. This is not good. We’re in the territory of the awkward uncle who everyone avoids until he turns up in his underwear on Christmas morning with his cat on a lead and then starts shouting energetically at your granny about Rubik’s cubes and hidden bases on the moon.

But perhaps we shouldn’t leap to judgements. In this painting, the barmy looking eccentric is presenting us with a thorny moral dilemma. He is the invigilator in a loose variant of a Schrödinger’s Cat scenario, where we will make an observation that decides an outcome. I’ll explain this a bit better in due course. But we have a few bits and pieces to cover before we get that far. First we need to understand what exactly we’re looking at and what kind of background context it’s set against.

The painting’s by a chap called Joseph Wright of Derby, a relatively provincial figure in English painting. It was done towards the end of the 1760s and is called ‘An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump’. This is the point in time when the Georgian era was in full swing. Britain was booming thanks to the first phase of a burgeoning empire, and – importantly for our purposes - Enlightenment thought and rationalism were very much to the fore. I know this sounds like the beginning of one of those excruciating cross tabulations of art with socio-politics that are cranked out by academics obsessed with social history. But don’t switch off quite yet. It’s not going to be as grim as that. And this one is well worth your time. Just stick with me over the next five or six paragraphs before throwing in the towel.

One of the trends that defined the Enlightenment, as everybody knows, was an explosion in rational inquiry. Interested amateur gentlemen began dissecting the observable world in an effort to understand how everything around us ticked. If they had the means, they passed their days in their studies, attics and outhouses, often made their own equipment, and generally got stuck in. All that nature had to offer was up for analysis. And one of the questions that troubled the Enlightenment’s best minds was whether or not it was possible for a vacuum to exist.

This may sound like a strange question to modern ears. But bear in mind that since antiquity it had been assumed that a vacuum was an impossibility. A void of nothingness in a world of somethingness? Preposterous. A metaphysical impossibility as much as a physical one. And so the thinking went until about one hundred years before our painting was knocked out by Wright. A clever German chap fashioned a pump that could suck air. He had two copper hemispheres built, smeared their rims with grease, pressed them together, and with his pump pulled the air out of the sphere they formed. The proof that he had created a vacuum lay in the fact that anyone could pull the hemispheres apart before he pumped them. But afterwards two teams of horses couldn’t split them. The ‘nothing’ that was within was being pressed upon by the ‘something’ that was outside.

The copper half spheres were called Magdeburg hemispheres, by the way. (I just want to flag this for you because they’ll crop up again later.) Once they had demonstrated that a vacuum could exist, as is often the case in scientific matters, another important question arose. If the hemispheres were held together by the something that was air pressing on a space that contained the nothing that was no air, what on earth was air? Again, we moderns take the answers to fundamentals like this for granted. But it really wasn’t at all clear to our forebears, who were bamboozled by the question, and found themselves scratching their heads at a loss to figure it out.

Not much progress had been made when the man in this rather severe portrait took an interest in the question. This is Robert Boyle. You might recall his eponymous law from chemistry class in school. Or perhaps you’re more like me - I was not as diligent as I could have been on that day in Mr. Moloney’s lab. Boyle had a logical insight. Maybe, he reasoned, we could work out an understanding of the nature and properties of air by observing what happens when it is denied to things that are usually surrounded by it. The man was nothing if not thorough. He realised he’d have to assess an extensive sample of these things if his experiments were to have any merit. And inevitably, the list of items destined for his tests included a variety of animal life.

Boyle got together the necessary air pump and some strong glass jars that enabled him to see what was going on inside as a vacuum was created around various species of animal he obtained. I needn’t tell you how this worked out for the little creatures. And to be fair to Boyle, he wasn’t so keen on what happened to them either. He called the death of the first bird he placed in a vacuum ‘a tragedy’. But he was a searcher after truth, no matter where it led. He managed to demonstrate that something about the air around us was of critical life-giving importance for much fauna. This was news. It was also a powerful example of how experiments could vividly reveal things that were previously hidden from us.

Sparked by pioneers like Boyle, a new rational approach to understanding the world took a firm hold over the next hundred years. Observable experimentation was all the rage. In Britain, the public’s appetite for scientific demonstrations involving electricity, vacuums like Boyle’s and so on grew particularly strong. (I ought to be careful here. The word ‘science’ was not in use yet. Not in the sense we understand it. Just bear that in mind, as I’ll be using it again as we go forward in place of the more cumbersome ‘natural philosophy’ I should deploy.) Over time, a sort of travelling ‘natural philosopher’ emerged who would go from place to place to carry out these demonstrations for a paying public. And the wild looking individual I started this story with is one such character.

So now we understand that what we can see in the painting is a natural philosopher recreating a famous experiment. It takes place in the house of a well-to-do Georgian family around a century after Boyle’s original effort. And on first glance all appears pretty much as you would expect it to. There is some understandable emotional drama with the two children, while those others who are present look on at an improving and educational demonstration. But as we do our dive, we’ll discover that there are less obvious tides moving beneath the surface.

The first thing to note is that this picture is built with light and shade. As is often the case with the best examples of this dramatic style of painting, the majority of the canvas is barely worked at all. Squint hard so the picture blurs for you, and you’ll see what I mean. The normal routine when viewing such a piece is to pay particular attention to those areas which are brightest. These are the zones that the painter wants to stand out and attract our attention. With this in mind, we immediately notice that the brightest element in the picture is the open jar filled with cloudy liquid containing a stick and some unidentifiable looking object. Not only is it the brightest space in the picture, it’s also dead centre on the horizontal plane. Obviously Wright wants us to consider this item carefully. And we will. But not before we have a look at a few other things. For now, I just want to put it on your radar.

There are a couple of other points of light we need to focus on. The first of them is the two children and what we must assume is their father. (Have a look at how beautifully Wright has arranged the girls, by the way - the gestures their hands make, the tilt of their heads, the smaller girl’s solitary two teeth. Magnificent.)The kids aren’t happy. They’re clearly distressed by what’s going on. We can assume from how well lit they are that Wright wants their anguish to come across to us strongly. The source of their upset is also robustly illuminated. The pale bird in the jar fluttering and suffocating in the vacuum. There’s something unusual about that bird.

In his initial - and surprisingly crude - sketch for the picture, Wright intended to deploy a more run of the mill bird that might be found in any English hedgerow. But in the end, he opted instead for an exotic cockatoo. The greater scale of bright white plumage grabs our attention and suits his design objectives better than, say, a smaller duller thrush would. But what’s curious about this choice is that no travelling philosopher of the time would use such an expensive bird in a fatal experiment. It’s an import. Regularly sourcing and killing cockatoos would have been hopelessly impractical. And probably close to unaffordable. When we look to the top right of the picture, we see it must have come from the open bird cage hanging from above. It appears this cockatoo is a pet. No wonder the girls are upset. This fatal experiment is being performed on a beloved family member. It’s all a bit too close to the bone.

And what’s all this suffering for anyway? If we look around the table, it’s not clear many people are even that interested in what’s going on. If we squint again, it’s apparent that Wright wants us to notice the young couple on the left. They’re ogling each other about as passionately as was publicly permitted by conventional Georgian etiquette. They’re besotted and seem happily unaware of their surroundings. It seems love has no time for scientific demonstrations. (Wright, by the way, would paint them both again a few years later when they married.) The boy seated below them is engrossed, but like a teenager gawping at road-kill. He’s not profiting in a meaningful way from the spectacle. The father across the table is too busy trying to explain things to his broken hearted daughters to pay attention. The older man on the right seems lost in far away thoughts. The young boy in the background is occupied with tasks of his own.

Only one person is constructively engaged with what’s taking place. The man in green below the philosopher. He holds in his hand a pocket watch. In the proper Enlightenment spirit, he times the cockatoo’s ordeal. This figure is Erasmus Darwin, a polymath, talented physician and grandfather of Charles. In fact, we know this scene was set in the study of his house. To this day, when it’s at its zenith, the moon is visible in exactly this position through the study window. That moon, you will have noticed, is another one of the highlighted areas. We’ll return to it towards the end of our expedition into the painting.

What was Wright trying to establish with this picture? The answer, I think, hinges on what is in the shining glass jar in the centre of the painting along with a number of other items scattered across the table. We’ll start with the sundry smaller objects. It may be hard to discern them clearly in this reproduction but we can find a candle snuffer, an eighteenth century alcohol thermometer, a bottle, straw and cork and finally a miniature pair of the Magdeburg hemispheres we discussed earlier. All of these objects share a common characteristic.

Each of these items can be used to illustrate some of the properties or effects of a vacuum. When the snuffer is placed snugly over a burning candle, the air inside is consumed by the flame until none is left. In the ensuing airless void, the flame winks out. The alcohol thermometer’s liquid levels can rise and fall in response to temperature changes thanks to the vacuum within which the alcohol sits. When the straw in the little bottle is sucked on, a vacuum is created within it. Air pressure on the liquid in the bottle forces it up the straw into that vacuum. When the bottle is empty, if a cork is placed in its neck and the bottle then left in an air pump like the one operated by the philosopher, the differing air pressures inside and outside the bottle will force the cork to pop out. The Magdeburg hemispheres, as we already noted, cannot be separated when joined together and pumped empty due to air pressure surrounding the vacuum within. Vacuums, vacuums, vacuums. So many ways to demonstrate and examine vacuums.

Finally we return to the radiant glass jar I mentioned before. That weird item within it has been much discussed. The majority of art historians who’ve taken a shot at identifying it suggest it is a deteriorated skull, a motif of death to echo the fate of the cockatoo. Having examined the other bits and pieces on the table, that seems unlikely though, doesn’t it? Particularly as there’s an alternative theory that states this is a pair of lungs from a sheep or pig. (It’s thought that some travelling philosophers made use of such organs in their demonstrations, so this would not have been as peculiar as it seems at first to us.) The surrounding liquid perhaps preserves the organ - a pointless precaution if it was a skull. Then there’s that long presumably hollow wand emerging from the lungs in the jar. Blow into it and the organs inflate. Suck on it and they will collapse, mimicking the effect of a vacuum pulling the air out of lungs contained in a chest. In other words, the arrangement in the glowing jar offers the best means possible of illustrating to an audience the effect of an air pump on a living creature. Now we begin to grasp why it’s centre stage in the pictorial design.

I think it’s pretty clear Wright is showing us that the demonstration on the cockatoo is unnecessary. Everything that the casual dilettante might want to know about the effects of vacuums on a living being can be easily divined from the other items he’s laid out. The little creature’s agonies are for nothing. They’re worthless. A point reinforced by how utterly uninterested most people around the table are. Take a moment to look at the seated older gent on the right. He seems a thoughtful type of fellow. But he looks down and away from the bird. He’s taken his glasses from their case on the table. But he hasn’t put them on. He simply holds them in his hand. He has no interest in looking that closely. His mind is somewhere else.

If it seems unlikely to us that an artist in the 1700s might paint a picture that waves a sort of placard for animal welfare, that’s because the assumptions we make about the time are often not so well informed. We imagine this was an epoch of perpetual cruel ambivalence and lips so unflinchingly stiff you could perch a stack of bricks on them. Not so. There were masses of fluttering hearts during the Georgian period. Robert Boyle’s first experiments on animals in air pumps had provoked enough upset that people branded him a fiend equal to the worst Roman emperors. Plenty of literature in circulation offered a similarly critical view of vivisection and its practitioners. For those who cared about this issue, travelling philosophers keen on asphyxiation were the very lowest of all the species involved.

This wariness of scientistic excesses didn’t stop at objections to travelling natural philosophers. For some, the macabre gimmicks these men offered their audiences were an insight into the nature of science itself. To such critics, Enlightenment reason was as cold and heartless a way of understanding the world as could be conceived of. It seemed a long way from the Christian prerogatives that were normal for so many people at the time. Nor was it just animals that suffered under its lens. It was also man. How could we hope to improve ourselves if we searched out information in such a disinterested and cruel fashion? What was best about us was being debased by a quest for knowledge that was too independent of moral values to be considered decent. We were being asked to grovel before a throne where Logic sat with a sceptre of pathological impartiality in hand.

It’s a long shot, but I cannot help wondering if Wright swapped a cockatoo for the nondescript bird we saw in his initial sketch not just for compositional reasons, but also because of all the birds known to Brits in the mid 1700s the cockatoo was one of very few that could imitate our speech. That beautiful creature fluttering so horribly at the base of the vacuum jar may not just be a pet loved by two girls. It could be us too, gasping for our human voice in the glassy void of ice cold rationality. This sense of disquiet at man’s relationship with inhumane and Godless experimenting has remained fizzing away under society’s surface right up to our present day. It’s clearest iteration was put together fifty years after this painting by Mary Shelley in her novel ‘Frankenstein’. Indeed, it’s hard not to note the similarities between our travelling philosopher’s intense appearance and that of any number of Victor Frankensteins that have crossed our screens over the last century. The wild haired magus who worships at the altar of callous experimentation, who twists shut the jar’s lid and plays with mortal forces outside the range of his empathy and understanding.

Or does he? While it’s easy to view the travelling philosopher in the picture as a pyjama wearing nutcase indulging in sadistic stunts for coin, it’s not clear that the artist’s intentions were so black and white. Have a look at the philosopher again. See how he points with a finger to the lungs in the glowing glass jar? See how his other hand rests on the lever that seals the vacuum? See his parted lips and direct stare? I think he is deferring to us, not himself, as the final judges of how best to carry on from here. He makes eye contact, raises his brow, points to the lungs and says ‘these are quite capable of illustrating all we want to know’. At the same time he is poised to open the vacuum around the cockatoo if we give the nod. It’s up to us to call a halt to the bird’s suffering. Or not. The cockatoo, as I mentioned at the start, is a sort of Schrödinger’s cat. It’s both alive and dead in this moment on the canvas. The moral observation we, the 18th century audience, make will decide which reality emerges. We will choose what kind of science man ought to practice. We will decide whether or not the philosopher allows air into the void; whether the cockatoo is buried in the garden or returned to its perch; whether the boy out of picture to the right lowers the cage to stow it away in the attic or to receive its occupant alive once more.

Yet it would be wrong to imagine that we are looking at a blanket protest against the advances science can offer. It seems to me the painting is more cautionary than prohibitive. In spite of his misgivings, Wright was open to science when it came from the right kind of people operating in the right kind of moral territory. At the time he painted this piece he was a member of a small group which styled itself as the ‘Lunar Society’. It’s participants labelled themselves - marvellously – as ‘Lunaticks’. These gents were an eclectic band of thinkers and doers who would gather to discuss how best the latest technological understandings of the time might be applied to improve the world. The ‘Lunar’ part of their name derives from their habit of meeting at the full moon of each month so as to have better light by which to make their way home after – we must hope – long claret fuelled dinners. These were not showmen keen on crass demonstrations. They were altogether more earnest and serious.

Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, who is the figure in green timing the cockatoo’s ordeal immediately below the philosopher, and in whose study this painting is set, was very much a fixture within the Lunar Society. He was in his early thirties at the time and equipped with the sort of roving but rigorous intellect that the age sometimes threw up in its best sons. Thoughtful, high minded, sincere and effective, the efforts of men like Erasmus were something Wright could approve of, and did. If decency was to be risked so that we might better understand the natural world around us, it was blokes like Erasmus who ought to lead the effort, not quacks. This, I think, is why he alone of all those around the table appears to address himself properly to the experiment that is taking place. In Erasmus’ universe, the cockatoo will perhaps die. But for the right reasons. Certainly not to put cash in the pocket of an itinerant third-rater, nor to satisfy the tepid curiosity of a jaded audience. Wright seems to be saying that if we are going to insist on supping with the Devil, we can get away with it – just – if we leave it to higher minds to pick up the long spoon. There are grounds to suppose that Wright’s views of science might have subtly changed later on, that he felt God ought to have a more central position in our explorations of the natural world. But when he painted this piece in 1768, no collection of people better embodied the elevated instincts he wished to see applied to science than the men of the Lunar Society. The full moon outside the study window – the final patch of light to which Wright draws our attention – is a direct reference to the group to which he and Erasmus belonged.

This is so unique a painting that it is hard to know how to end our investigation of it. And time constraints have stopped me from going too deep. I could have unpicked subtle components elsewhere that reinforce the overall sentiment: the fur worn by the young woman, the way the smaller girl’s headdress echoes the plumage of the cockatoo and the innocence they each have in common, the slick little touch of having the father point to one type of experiment while the philosopher points to another, and so on. All these less obvious elements add depth. Wright probably felt we would need the clues too. After all, vivisection and its effect on our moral wellbeing is not something that ever crops up in the art history of bygone times. In fact, apart from the odd depiction of a zany medieval alchemist, scientific endeavour hardly features at all. But perhaps the most notable thing about the piece is the way in which it has been painted. The dramatic light and shade we see here (‘tenebrism’, if we’re going to get formal) was usually the preserve of religious or mythological works from Italy or Holland, not England. A tightly composed group arranged in the darkness around a table where right and wrong hover in the balance? We expect this look from a Caravaggio where Christ calls to an apostle, not from a Georgian artist concerned with the ethical risks of scientific investigation in Britain. This is groundbreaking stuff.

And Wright pulls it off so very well. Those darks and lights reveal a place of lush, vivid colour where he offers us a scene of moral tension no less compelling than the best dramas we see elsewhere in great western art. The people assembled around the experiment form a pyramid of light which has its apex in the hand of the philosopher poised on the lever that opens the jar; the hand that can give life or death, that can steer us to barbarism or decency. It is not an accident that the exact spot where the lid’s handle and the philosopher’s fingers meet was placed by Wright smack bang in the horizontal centre of the canvas. This is the crux of the painting - not just geometrically but also metaphorically - where the dead instrument of science meets the breathing agency of man. It is here that everything the picture addresses is pared back to a single essential question: is the lid of the jar to be opened or not? Are we to pursue knowledge with compassion or with hazardous zeal? The artist designed his composition so that the eagle eyed amongst us would perceive that what separates the two realities could be as small as a flick of a finger. This is brilliantly intelligent design.

It’s generally the case in the world of art that when we hear the word ‘original’, chances are someone’s about to inflict the contents of their snake oil stall on us. Far too often the word has been used as camouflage behind which the gibberish efforts of overrated gimps can be hidden from honest questions. But in this picture we are seeing something that truly is original. We see a style of painting – a very difficult one at that – applied to subject matter that never before or after was depicted this way. We see an artist immerse himself in the ethical challenges of his age with nuance, composure and imagination. There is no hectoring here. We’re not lectured. No one is cast as evil. Wright is too intelligent to oversimplify the issue. In an age like ours where no topic is too small for the exaggerated, judgemental convictions of perma-outraged finger jabbers, this painting is an elegant and refreshing reminder that there are better ways of addressing sensitive issues.

You might imagine that Wright earned plaudits for the utterly beautiful invention and derring-do he managed here with his brush. And he did. When he exhibited the piece in 1768, the response was appreciative. Yet in spite of this the painter from Derby didn’t feel welcome in the artistic circles of cosmopolitan cities like London and Bath, the places to which he should have subsequently gone if he was on an upward trajectory. We know his health deteriorated badly soon afterwards. It is also thought he may have been prone to paranoia. It’s no surprise to learn therefore that in time Wright fell out with his artistic contemporaries in the Royal Society. He felt they had unjustly snubbed him, and lived the rest of his life well outside of the mainstream as a relatively provincial artist in his native town. The man never again attempted a scene quite so ambitious as the one we see here. More is the pity. It’s hard to look at the many landscapes and portraits he painted afterwards and not think that, for all their appeal, something brilliant inside him had been left behind in 1768. It seems the cliché of the artist pumping out his best work when troubled and suffering does not always hold true.