Joseph Wright of Derby an English landscape and portrait painter who has been acclaimed “the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution” by Francis Klingender, who was a Marxist art …show more content…
The art its self is a marvelous and terrifying sight. Looking at the image as what it is you can get a lot of mixed emotions as what is going on in the picture and immediately you can notice that there is not so much the experiment going on that can interest Wright. Wright also used the experiment to communicate the shift in attitude towards science in the ordinary minds of regular people. There is also a lot of questions to as why is there a bird in a glass bowl, a little girl crying, why does the other half look less interested with what is going around them, engaging a conversation that is not related to the experiment and why does one of the man seem keen to get the crying girl’s attention to look at the …show more content…
The youngest are in fear, from the image you can tell that one of them cannot even stand to look at the suffering bird. The man seated on the right of the table, seems to be lost, less interested, he is there in person but his mind seem to be elsewhere but in actuality he is man contemplating a skull in liquid that is front of him. There is also a middle aged couple on the left gazing at each other rather than at the air pump, next to them seems to be the conductor on the event, the scientist, dressed in a loose fitting red robe, surrounded by eight members of an upper-class household. Also a boy, who possibly is a servant, is replacing what seems to be the bird's cage at the window. Joseph Wright of Derby's turned his 1768 painting of a cruel scientific experiment into a potent drama of light and darkness. An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump seems is filled with tension and the excitements of its historical moment. Everyone is gathered around the table in a circle. The only light source is a lit candle, the room is dark, and a scientific experiment is being