Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump

I used to take friends and colleagues to lunch at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain). The food was good.

But the real reason that I went there was to see this painting, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, by Joseph Wright of Derby. He painted it in 1768.

In it, candlelit, a scientist with wild grey hair, an image that was to become the very archetype, shows to a group of family and friends the effects on a fluttering, panic-stricken white cockatoo of using an air-pump to create a vacuum.   

Will the bird live? The children are frightened – reassured by their father(?). The boy on the left is absorbed in the experiment, but the young couple (extreme left) are fascinated only by each other. Is the seated pensive grey-haired man (extreme right) a second image of the scientist? 

Through the window (top right) we see a full moon. This has been interpreted as a reference to the Lunar Society, a group of men in the English Midlands (centred on Birmingham) engaged in exploring the practical potentialities of science.

They were friends of Joseph Wright and would together be a major catalyst for the Industrial Revolution – among them the pioneering manufacturer Matthew Boulton, Scottish engineer and inventor of the steam engine James Watt, the great potter Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles. Another member was Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen just a few years after Wright painted this picture.

By the way, the painting has now returned to its proper home, the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

Getting to grips with Art

Walking through the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris (with its fabulous collection of Monets (above), Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses, Derains, Picassos etc) together with a friend some years ago, I was astonished when he completed his inspection in less than five minutes. “Oh, yes,” he announced. “Seen 'em all.”

Recent research confirms that visitors to art museums spend just a few seconds looking at each painting. Most people then take considerably longer reading the information labels. Not my friend.

I wonder why it is that people really don’t take the time to look at the works of art themselves.

The process that I use started when I began to teach myself something about art history some four decades ago. I was working at the time at Saatchi & Saatchi in Charlotte Street and could interrupt my twenty minute walk back to Charing Cross Station (on my way home) by dropping into the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. This I did most working days.

Each visit I would look at just three paintings: the one I had studied yesterday, the one which was to be the main focus for today, and the one that I would turn to tomorrow. So, over time, each painting presented three substantial opportunities for me to look (and to think) – about composition, colour, light, brushwork, subject, idea, intention, context and so on.

It gave me the possibility of beginning to understand, accompanied (it goes without saying) by one of the finest collections of Western art in the world. And it was the start of a lifetime of looking at paintings.

Not sure one can achieve that with just a glance.