Oil on Canvas
24 x 20 ins. (61 x 50.8 cm.)
Provenance
(Probably) William Frederick Rock (b.1802, d 1890), Blackheath;
North Devon Athenaeum (founded by W.F. Rock in 1888) until 2010.
We are grateful to Dr Brian Allen of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, for confirming the attribution to Joseph Wright of Derby following first hand inspection of the painting.
A Girl with a Dove is an exceptionally beautiful and charming work painted during Wright’s early maturity of the mid 1760’s. The artist’s depictions of children are rightly counted amongst his greatest works, and form a central part of his contemporaneous masterpiece ‘An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump’ of 1768 (National Gallery, London). Other superb examples of Wright’s child portraiture include Two Girls Dressing a Kitten by Candlelight (Kenwood House, Iveagh bequest) of c.1768 – 70, and Two Girls by an Urn with their Servant (private collection) of c.1770. While the former is regarded as an allegory on the cruelty of girls, the sitter in our painting is depicted in quiet harmony with her charge – the Dove in this context representing fidelity.(i)
Throughout his career, Joseph Wright had an absorbing interest in the effects of light, and his innovations in this area mark him out as one of the most interesting and important painters of his generation. While his earliest works reflect the poses and glowing tones of his master Thomas Hudson, he soon developed a preoccupation with the atmospheric effects of light which are a hallmark of his work. In the present painting, the girl’s beautiful blue dress glows in light reflected from an unseen source, placed high up and to the left. A more diffuse light softens her features, while the shaded half of her face is silhouetted against a warm glow of reflected candle light.
Wright’s preoccupation with chiaroscuro and the effects of candlelight reflect his debt to seventeenth century Dutch artists, specifically the Utrecht Caravaggisti, Hendrick Ter Bruggen and Gerrit van Honthorst. Wright also seems to have admired later Netherlandish genre painters such as Gerrit Dou and his pupil Godfried Schalcken, whose works were reproduced in England in engravings in the 1760’s. A Girl with a Dove is also infused with a rococo spirit which reflects contemporary developments in French painting, notably in the work of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Greuze, who at this time was building his fame with small scale depictions of girls and young women in various têtes d'expression, published many of them in 1766 as a volume entitled Têtes de différents caractères, and it seems likely that Wright would have seen them and drawn inspiration from them. Unlike Greuze however, whose work is sometimes regarded as excessively sentimental, Wright’s Girl with a Dove is splendidly natural and uncontrived.
BIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY
Joseph Wright was born in Irongate, Derby, the son of John Wright, an attorney, and his wife, Hannah Brookes. Wright was educated at Derby grammar school and taught himself to draw by copying prints. Wright went to London in 1751 and for two years studied under Thomas Hudson, one of the leading society portraitists of the day. In 1753 he settled in Derby and began to distinguish his portraiture using strong chiaroscuro under artificial light, and by landscape painting. In 1756 Wright re-entered Hudson's studio for 15 months, forming a lasting friendship with his fellow pupil John Hamilton Mortimer. Wright also spent a productive period in Liverpool, from 1768 to 1771, painting portraits.
Wright married Ann (also known as Hannah) Swift in 1773, and at the end of that year visited Italy, where he remained till 1775. While in Naples, Wright witnessed an eruption of Mount Vesuvius which formed the subject of many of his subsequent paintings. On his return from Italy he established himself at Bath as a portrait-painter, but soon returned to Derby where he spent the rest of his life.
Wright was a frequent contributor to the exhibitions of the Society of Artists, and to those of the Royal Academy, of which he was elected an associate in 1781. In 1784 he was elected for full membership of the Royal Acadmey, but he declined the honour, and later held the RA in considerable suspicion.
The label ‘Wright of Derby’ was first bestowed on him by the Gazetteer's exhibition reviewer of 1768. In an age when it would have been improper to use artists' Christian names, it was necessary to differentiate between the work of two ‘Mr Wrights’—Joseph (who began exhibiting in 1765) and Richard Wright of Liverpool (an exhibitor since 1762).
Joseph Wright’s work is represented in many of the great museums of the world, including the National Gallery (London), the Louvre, the Royal Collection, the Tate Gallery, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Hermitage Museum, the National Gallery (Washington), the Fine Arts Museum (San Francisco) and the J. Paul Getty Museum.
(i) The iconography of a girl or young woman with a dove was used contemporaneously by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who explained this symbolism of fidelity in a letter to Prince Yussupoff of 1790 (viz. The Wallace Collection’s Pictures, a complete catalogue, 2004, p.177, Cat. P398.)