ITP 59: An Academy by Lamplight, Joseph Wright of Derby
In anticipation of this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which opens to the public on Tuesday, today’s picture is Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Academy by Lamplight. It was painted in 1768, the year of the Royal Academy’s foundation, and may fairly be regarded as a textbook illustration of the values which Britain’s oldest art institution was originally formed to protect, promote and inculcate.
In a vaulted sculpture gallery six young men are gathered before the statue of an enigmatically smiling, scantily dressed classical goddess. They pay her varying degrees of attention which range from solemn studiousness to sleepy indifference. One of them, leaning against the statue’s plinth, head propped on his elbow, has a dreamy, amorous look in his eyes. Beside him, a rather older man with receding hair gazes away into the middle distance, a high-minded expression on his face. Holding a portfolio under his arm, he has the air of an enthusiastic and slightly abstracted teacher. Perhaps he is the boys’ tutor.
The first academies of art had been established during the Renaissance, in Italy, but the eighteenth century brought a sudden exponential growth in the number of such institutions. They came into being all over Europe: in Copenhagen, Stockholm, St Petersburg, Dresden, Naples, Venice, Dijon and Valencia; and as far afield as Mexico, where an Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1785. One reason for this was the increasing desire of artists everywhere to be recognised as members of a liberal and literate profession – one which demanded intellectual discipline and specialised knowledge of its practitioners, not just the manual skills of an artisan.
By the time Wright painted An Academy by Lamplight, the prescribed course of academic study for would-be artists was well established. First, the student was to make drawings of the most universally admired classical statues, or – more likely – to copy plaster casts of those illustrious works. Once he had developed his skills to a certain point, he would be allowed to draw the nude, from life. Then, having reached this second stage, he was gradually to penetrate deeper into the mysteries of art, studying such subjects as perspective, anatomy, colouring and composition. The details for the conduct of the Royal Academy Schools assume an educational progression along such lines:
“Each student, who offers himself for Admission into the Royal Schools, shall present a Drawing or Model from some Plaister Cast to the Keeper, and if he thinks him properly qualified, he shall be permitted to make a Drawing or Model from some Cast in the Royal Academy, which if approved of by the Keeper and Visitor for the time being, shall be laid before the Council for their confirmation, which obtained he shall receive his Letter of Admission as a Student in the Royal Academy Where he shall continue to draw after the Plaister, till the Keeper and Visitor for the time being, judge him qualified to draw after the Living Models, when they shall have power to admit him.”
The students in Wright’s painting are in the early stages of their art education, as might be assumed from their young age. The antique statue which they are contemplating is the so-called Nymph with a Shell. A heavily restored Roman copy of a lost hellenistic original, it was much admired in the eighteenth-century, and regarded as one of the ideal prototypes of female beauty. Behind the students, in dark shadows to the right, the figure of the Borghese Gladiator can be dimly perceived: a complementary epitome of male strength and resolve. Both statues can be assumed to be marble copies or “Plaister Casts”, since the originals were to be found in the Villa Borghese in Rome during Wright’s lifetime. (They are now to be found in the Louvre.)
The location of Wright’s academy has not been identified with certainty. It cannot have been the Royal Academy Schools, because they had not yet come into being when the picture was painted. Some believe that it may represent the Duke of Richmond’s sculpture gallery in Whitehall, generously thrown open to students after 1758. Others have suggested that the painter depicted Towneley’s Gallery, where according to a contemporary description “Lamps were placed to form the happiest contrast of light and shade, and the improved effect of the marble amounted by this almost to animation … To a mind replete with classical imagery the illusion was perfect.” Another possibility is that Wright’s academy is a purely imaginary space. The painting may well have been mocked up in his studio, where he had a complicated apparatus of folding black-out screens which he used to control the dramatic, Caravaggesque effects of candlelight and firelight in which he specialised.
The mixture of idealism and rapture with which eighteenth-century artists and theorists regarded antique sculpture was most eloquently expressed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Royal Academy’s first president, in the sixth of his annual Discourses to the students. Reynolds was passionately opposed to the encouragement of unbridled originality, which he felt could only lead artists into self-repetition and self-parody. For him, genius was always and inevitably “the child of imitation”. The mind of man, he declared, can “produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilised or enriched with foreign matter” – and nothing was more nourishing to the young student than the example of antique art. “We must trace the art back to its fountainhead – the monuments of pure antiquity. All the inventions and thoughts of the ancients, whether conveyed to us in statues, bas-reliefs, intaglios, cameos, or coins, are to be sought after and carefully studied; the genius that hovers over these venerable relics, may be called the father of modern art.”
Wright brilliantly embodied this educational ideal, of a passionate engagement with the art of the past, by investing the aesthetic encounter of student and statue with positively sexual tensions and emotions. The smiling stone nymph seems to be coming to life as we look, like Pygmalion’s Galatea. The students gathered around her might indeed be her lovers, such is the strength of feeling and devotion she seems to arouse in them – passions thrown into yet sharper relief by the presence of the two much younger boys, who gawp and doze uncomprehendingly. Falling in love with the art of the past is presented not as a dull duty, but as a drama – a rite of passage as profound and life-altering, in its effects, as that of entering manhood.
Date: 03-06-2001
Owning Institution: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection.
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
18th Century
In anticipation of this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which opens to the public on Tuesday, today’s picture is Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Academy by Lamplight. It was painted in 1768, the year of the Royal Academy’s foundation, and may fairly be regarded as a textbook illustration of the values which Britain’s oldest art institution was originally formed to protect, promote and inculcate.In a vaulted sculpture gallery six young men are gathered before the statue of an enigmatically smiling, scantily dressed classical goddess. They pay her varying degrees of attention which range from solemn studiousness to sleepy indifference. One of them, leaning against the statue’s plinth, head propped on his elbow, has a dreamy, amorous look in his eyes. Beside him, a rather older man with receding hair gazes away into the middle distance, a high-minded expression on his face. Holding a portfolio under his arm, he has the air of an enthusiastic and slightly abstracted teacher. Perhaps he is the boys’ tutor.
The first academies of art had been established during the Renaissance, in Italy, but the eighteenth century brought a sudden exponential growth in the number of such institutions. They came into being all over Europe: in Copenhagen, Stockholm, St Petersburg, Dresden, Naples, Venice, Dijon and Valencia; and as far afield as Mexico, where an Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1785. One reason for this was the increasing desire of artists everywhere to be recognised as members of a liberal and literate profession – one which demanded intellectual discipline and specialised knowledge of its practitioners, not just the manual skills of an artisan.
By the time Wright painted An Academy by Lamplight, the prescribed course of academic study for would-be artists was well established. First, the student was to make drawings of the most universally admired classical statues, or – more likely – to copy plaster casts of those illustrious works. Once he had developed his skills to a certain point, he would be allowed to draw the nude, from life. Then, having reached this second stage, he was gradually to penetrate deeper into the mysteries of art, studying such subjects as perspective, anatomy, colouring and composition. The details for the conduct of the Royal Academy Schools assume an educational progression along such lines:
“Each student, who offers himself for Admission into the Royal Schools, shall present a Drawing or Model from some Plaister Cast to the Keeper, and if he thinks him properly qualified, he shall be permitted to make a Drawing or Model from some Cast in the Royal Academy, which if approved of by the Keeper and Visitor for the time being, shall be laid before the Council for their confirmation, which obtained he shall receive his Letter of Admission as a Student in the Royal Academy Where he shall continue to draw after the Plaister, till the Keeper and Visitor for the time being, judge him qualified to draw after the Living Models, when they shall have power to admit him.”
The students in Wright’s painting are in the early stages of their art education, as might be assumed from their young age. The antique statue which they are contemplating is the so-called Nymph with a Shell. A heavily restored Roman copy of a lost hellenistic original, it was much admired in the eighteenth-century, and regarded as one of the ideal prototypes of female beauty. Behind the students, in dark shadows to the right, the figure of the Borghese Gladiator can be dimly perceived: a complementary epitome of male strength and resolve. Both statues can be assumed to be marble copies or “Plaister Casts”, since the originals were to be found in the Villa Borghese in Rome during Wright’s lifetime. (They are now to be found in the Louvre.)
The location of Wright’s academy has not been identified with certainty. It cannot have been the Royal Academy Schools, because they had not yet come into being when the picture was painted. Some believe that it may represent the Duke of Richmond’s sculpture gallery in Whitehall, generously thrown open to students after 1758. Others have suggested that the painter depicted Towneley’s Gallery, where according to a contemporary description “Lamps were placed to form the happiest contrast of light and shade, and the improved effect of the marble amounted by this almost to animation … To a mind replete with classical imagery the illusion was perfect.” Another possibility is that Wright’s academy is a purely imaginary space. The painting may well have been mocked up in his studio, where he had a complicated apparatus of folding black-out screens which he used to control the dramatic, Caravaggesque effects of candlelight and firelight in which he specialised.
The mixture of idealism and rapture with which eighteenth-century artists and theorists regarded antique sculpture was most eloquently expressed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Royal Academy’s first president, in the sixth of his annual Discourses to the students. Reynolds was passionately opposed to the encouragement of unbridled originality, which he felt could only lead artists into self-repetition and self-parody. For him, genius was always and inevitably “the child of imitation”. The mind of man, he declared, can “produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilised or enriched with foreign matter” – and nothing was more nourishing to the young student than the example of antique art. “We must trace the art back to its fountainhead – the monuments of pure antiquity. All the inventions and thoughts of the ancients, whether conveyed to us in statues, bas-reliefs, intaglios, cameos, or coins, are to be sought after and carefully studied; the genius that hovers over these venerable relics, may be called the father of modern art.”
Wright brilliantly embodied this educational ideal, of a passionate engagement with the art of the past, by investing the aesthetic encounter of student and statue with positively sexual tensions and emotions. The smiling stone nymph seems to be coming to life as we look, like Pygmalion’s Galatea. The students gathered around her might indeed be her lovers, such is the strength of feeling and devotion she seems to arouse in them – passions thrown into yet sharper relief by the presence of the two much younger boys, who gawp and doze uncomprehendingly. Falling in love with the art of the past is presented not as a dull duty, but as a drama – a rite of passage as profound and life-altering, in its effects, as that of entering manhood.
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