A Journalist Lecturing on the Orrery

An orrery is a clockwork model of the solar system: small metal globes stand for the planets, each carried on its own arm, and when the mechanism turns, the arms swing the globes around a central point in the same order, and with the same relative motions, as the real planets around the sun. In Wright's painting a lecturer is demonstrating one to a small audience gathered close enough to touch it. The painting's full period title supplies the detail that makes sense of everything else: A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun. A lamp burns at the centre of the model, exactly where the sun sits at the centre of the real solar system.

Follow what that lamp does, step by step, and the whole picture explains itself. The flame lights the side of each small globe that faces it and leaves the far side dark — which is what the sun does to the real planets, and why each of them has a day side and a night side. When one globe passes between the lamp and another, its shadow falls across its neighbour, which is how an eclipse works. The shadows, in other words, are not a side effect of the demonstration. They are the demonstration. And they survive only if the lamp is the one light in the room: light a second candle anywhere and it fills in the shadows, and the lesson vanishes. So the room is dark not for mood but because the display fails otherwise.

Wright then makes a further choice: he hides the very lamp the scene depends on. It sits low at the model's centre, blocked from our view by the mechanism's arms and by the bodies leaning in. We never see the flame itself. We see only what it does — faces lit from below, brass edges picked out, the room beyond dissolving into brown shadow. The brightest things in the painting are people, not fire.

The canvas belongs to a short sequence, and the sequence is worth walking through, because it shows a painter discovering what a lighting scheme could do. In 1765 Wright painted Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, the first of his candlelit masterpieces, in which three men study a small copy of the antique sculpture known as the Borghese Gladiator. That picture was greatly admired. The Orrery, which followed in 1766, caused a greater stir, and the reason usually given is the swap at its centre: where the earlier canvas had a piece of classical sculpture, this one has a scientific instrument. After it came An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, now in the National Gallery in London — the same recipe of dark room, single light and ring of absorbed faces, applied to a demonstration in which a bird is deprived of air.

The first two pictures can each defend their darkness on practical grounds. Looking at sculpture by candlelight was a fashionable pastime in Wright's day — Goethe describes it — because a single moving flame shows the carved contours well and its flicker can even give an impression of movement in the marble. The orrery, as we have seen, needs its lamp: the shadows it casts are an essential part of the display. The air pump is where the justification runs out. Nothing about that experiment requires a single candle, and two later paintings of the same subject by Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo show the scene under ordinary light. Set beside them, the darkness in Wright's air pump picture looks like a device he had learned he could use, rather than a record of how such evenings were lit. The Orrery sits at the hinge of that development: the last of the candlelit pictures whose darkness the subject itself demands.

The canvas is large: 147.2 centimetres (4 ft 10 in) high by 203.2 centimetres (6 ft 8 in) wide. Formally it is classified as genre art, which means a scene of everyday life — not a religious episode, a battle or a portrait of state. That classification matters, because Wright is doing something new inside it. Painters before him knew how to show a roomful of people struck with awe, but that treatment was reserved for religious events, where the wonder had a supernatural cause. Wright paints the same awe on faces watching a machine. To him, the marvels of the technological age were as awe-inspiring as the subjects of the great religious paintings, and he gives ordinary people looking at an instrument the scale and gravity those grander subjects usually received.

Even the painting's name is not quite settled. The database record used here calls it A Journalist Lecturing on the Orrery, while the picture is generally known as A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, under the fuller period title given above. Nothing in the facts to hand resolves which word belongs in the short title, and the difference is not trivial: in Wright's century, philosopher covered what we would now call a natural scientist — exactly the sort of man who might tour with an orrery.

Much else sits outside the record as it stands. Who the figures are, whether any are portraits of real people, who commissioned the canvas and what was said about it at the time cannot be stated from the sources used here, and the gap is worth noting: for a painting this celebrated, the plain documented facts are few. They are these — Joseph Wright of Derby, 1766, oil on canvas — and the painting still hangs in Derby, in the museum and art gallery of the town whose name the painter carries.