Summary Of Derby's An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump

This essay is going to look into two images, comparing the two images, critically analyze them in detail. This essay will also analyze the images into deep detail to extract every symbolic meaning from the images to simplify them. The first image I am going to analyze critically is “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump”, A painting completed by Joseph Wright of Derby in 1768 about what happens to a bird when you deprive it of oxygen. I will be looking into the subject, subliminal messages and the artist’s history of painting.

Joseph Wright of Derby an English landscape and portrait painter who has been acclaimed “the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution” by Francis Klingender, who was a Marxist art
historian. Joseph a painter who is commonly recognized for his paintings of industrial scenes and Chiaroscuro effect, an effect that use strong contrasts between light and dark. Joseph uses this effect mostly on his paintings of candle-lit subjects. Majority of Joseph wright’s work is owned by Derby City Council, displayed to people to see at Derby Museum and National Gallery.

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump is one of Joseph wright’s masterpieces.
An Oil-on-canvas type of painting done with a lot of high contrast in the shadows, typical of wright’s painting with his known Chiaroscuro effect.
The art its self is a marvelous and terrifying sight. Looking at the image as what it is you can get a lot of mixed emotions as what is going on in the picture and immediately you can notice that there is not so much the experiment going on that can interest Wright. Wright also used the experiment to communicate the shift in attitude towards science in the ordinary minds of regular people. There is also a lot of questions to as why is there a bird in a glass bowl, a little girl crying, why does the other half look less interested with what is going around them, engaging a conversation that is not related to the experiment and why does one of the man seem keen to get the crying girl’s attention to look at the
bird.

The dramatic difference from the youngest to the eldest is obvious.
The youngest are in fear, from the image you can tell that one of them cannot even stand to look at the suffering bird. The man seated on the right of the table, seems to be lost, less interested, he is there in person but his mind seem to be elsewhere but in actuality he is man contemplating a skull in liquid that is front of him. There is also a middle aged couple on the left gazing at each other rather than at the air pump, next to them seems to be the conductor on the event, the scientist, dressed in a loose fitting red robe, surrounded by eight members of an upper-class household. Also a boy, who possibly is a servant, is replacing what seems to be the bird's cage at the window. Joseph Wright of Derby's turned his 1768 painting of a cruel scientific experiment into a potent drama of light and darkness. An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump seems is filled with tension and the excitements of its historical moment. Everyone is gathered around the table in a circle. The only light source is a lit candle, the room is dark, and a scientific experiment is being
staged.

Joseph Wright’s painting is interesting when it is analyzed between Science and Art. In the mid-seventeenth century, the air pump was invented and recognized as a device that could demonstrate the effects of near vacuum on animate and inanimate objects. Throughout demonstrations the results were as the air is coming out from the bowl, this would increase the bird’s growth, vice versa with air pumping into the bowl the bird, would recover. James Ferguson, a self, taught scientist came to the realization that using a live bird in the experiment might be “too shocking to every spectator who has the least degree of humanity.” Ferguson went on to try using mechanical lungs to replace the live animal. Just
Like a brilliant visual trick, the scene from the image emerges darkness dramatically lit by a single candle, while in the window the moon swimming through clouds. The presentation and Detail enhances our feeling with a miniscule pulse-beat to the atmosphere that what is happening here is a form of prestidigitation. The scientist and the elderly man, who is contemplatively looking at the skull, seem to show us that the painting’s subject is also a mutability of life. Which bring the questions. What if we direct our focus on the two girls, who turned away from the science experiment, or on the young couple, who are ignoring the experiment and what of the bird itself?

Joseph wright’s intend of the painting may have be to portrait a scene of everyday life has been presented on the scale of an altarpiece. In hindsight it could have been wright’s way of hinting religious lessons, which he believed could be drawn from contemporary science. The bird could have been representation of God the Father with the dove of the Holy Spirit. Wright could have been trying to reflect on god’s gift of oxygen and within it life. Wright’s intend could also be different, the message could be a man of science parading his own imagination, where he has a god-like power.