An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump

1768

Oil on canvas, 183 × 244 cm. National Gallery, London

A lecturer draws the air out of a glass bowl while a household watches a trapped bird struggle for breath. The National Gallery calls it a modern vanitas, a picture about the fragility of life.

First shown at the Society of Artists in London, then again that September for the visiting King of Denmark.
Look at the young couple beside the lecturer, Wright's friends Thomas Coltman and Mary Barlow, absorbed in each other.
A first idea for the composition survives, painted on the back of a Wright self-portrait.
Science becomes drama: candlelight picks faces out of the dark, each reacting differently to the bird's fate. Romantic artists took up this staging of feeling around a scene of reason.
Presented to the National Gallery by Edward Tyrrell in 1863.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (PD-Art)