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How to Read Paintings: An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby
Why this Extraordinary Painting Shows a Cruel Scientific Experiment
The first thing that draws your eye in this remarkable painting, made by the British artist Joseph Wright, is the expression of the scientist — or the “natural philosopher” as he would have been called at the time.
He is about to perform a merciless scientific experiment. His look is moderately confrontational: the raised eyebrows, the slightly pursed lips, the way the head is turned fractionally to the side so the light sweeps across one cheek and casts the shadow of his nose across the other. It is a gaze poised between invitation and challenge, a look that’s designed to test us.
This painting, titled An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, depicts a demonstration of the effects of a vacuum on a living bird. What the artist brilliantly achieves is a kind of theatre with a moral question at its heart: Will you look dispassionately at the experiment — in which a bird is about to be suffocated to death — or will you have to avert your senses out of horror?
