Two Boys with a Bladder

Joseph Wright of Derby made his name in the 1760s with candlelit scenes that joined the drama of the Enlightenment to the old Dutch tradition of artificial light, and this picture of two boys inflating a pig’s bladder belongs to the same family as his celebrated *Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump*. Painted in 1767, it shows the younger boy struggling to blow up the bladder while his companion looks on, the single candle between them casting their faces and hands into sculptural relief against the surrounding darkness. Wright’s fascination with light — its physics, its beauty and its menace — gives the little genre scene a gravity beyond its subject, and made him the most original painter of the English provincial Enlightenment. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.