An Academy by Lamplight

Wright painted this canvas in 1769 for Peniston Lamb, first Viscount Melbourne, and the museum records that it remained at Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire through four generations of the Lamb and Cowper families — passing to Lamb’s son William, the second Viscount, and later to Emily Lamb, Viscountess Palmerston — before it left the family in the twentieth century. It was shown with the Society of Artists in 1769, where the critics praised it warmly, and the museum reads it as an imaginary art academy: an ideal community of young artists gathered around a plaster cast, with the refining influence of the antique set against a more aggressive ideal of masculinity. A handwritten label on the reverse preserves the picture’s old loan title, “Joseph Wright of Derby / Academy by Lamplight.” Between 1929 and 1953 it hung at Down House, the home of Charles Darwin, on loan to scientific bodies; Paul Mellon acquired it in 1964 and gave it to the Yale Center for British Art in 1973.