A new Wright of Derby for the new Wright Gallery?
February 20 2012
Picture: Derby Museum
Later this week, the newly refurbished Joseph Wright Gallery will open at Derby museum, after a £150,000 renovation. Some of the museum's 34 oil paintings by Wright have been restored too. It will be well worth a visit, and congratulations to all involved; getting funds to restore a regional gallery these days can't be easy.
I'd like to suggest that the museum in fact has 35 paintings by Wright, and that the above work from their collection, currently catalogued as 'attributed to Allan Ramsay', may be an early work by Wright. The picture is very close to Wright's style in the late 1750s and early 1760s, and can be compared to a portrait we discovered at Philip Mould a couple of years ago of Thomas Thompson [below], who is listed in Wright's account book for 1760. Both pictures show the same jaunty characterisation which set Wright apart from his occassionally stiff master, Thomas Hudson, and show similar handling in details such as the drapery, the lace and gold braid. Particularly noticeable in the picture at Derby Museum is Wright's trademark way of painting eyes, with the lower half of the iris a rich crescent of colour. Hopefully, cleaning and restoration will allow a more certain attribution to be made.
I came across the Derby picture through the indispensable Public Catalogue Foundation whilst doing some research on Jacobite portraiture. The sitter had in the past been described as of Bonnie Prince Charlie, but of course it is not him (no blue Garter sash for a start). But now the sitter has been identified (through a copy in a private collection) by the military historian Andrew Cormack as Cornet Edward Walpole (see Andrew's article in the winter 2009 edition of the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research). The copy had been attributed to Thomas Hudson, as often happens with early Wrights. Our Thomas Thompson had been attributed to Thomas Hudson from at least the early 20th Century. No Walpole appears in Wright's surviving (and rather chaotic) account book - but not all of his sitters are listed in the book.
