In a dark library lit by a single lamp, four men, a young woman and three children crowd around a circular dais. They are staring at a clockwork contraption called an orrery, housed within giant bands of metal that suggest a celestial sphere. Below, tiny planets rotate around the Sun, orbited by pearl moons. Concentric plates allow the planets to move according to their relative speeds. The lecturer in his striking red gown is pointing to Jupiter’s moons, while a younger man in a purple coat and gold striped waistcoat assiduously takes notes. His notetaking implies the event isn’t run-of-the-mill, but something special and worth recording. A small lamp has taken the place of the central sun in the orrery and throws light upon everyone’s faces. We can only see it as a reflection below the elbow of the silhouetted youth in the foreground – a wick burning in a jar of oil. The lamplight adds an eager gleam to the eyes of the inquisitive young children and illuminates the contemplative gaze of the young man on the right. It highlights the edges of the young woman’s frilled bonnet and the cheekbones of the adolescent who leans over the edge of the orrery in front of us. It is his shoulder that we can look over without feeling as if we are intruding. The lamp illuminates all our faces as our minds are enlightened by the science we observe in action.

Today, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is Put in the Place of the Sun (1766) by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) is rightly considered a masterpiece. When it was first exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Society of Artists in Spring Gardens, London, in 1766, reviewers singled it out for particular praise, saying it was ‘exceeding fine’. It attracted more attention than any other work on display, inspiring one reviewer to break out in rhyming couplets: ‘Without a rival let this “Wright” be known,/For this amazing province is his own.’ Wright’s Orrery was a huge statement from a young and ambitious artist. So why, then, was he overlooked when the Royal Academy of Arts was founded by George III just two years later? When Wright had been lauded as a ‘genius’ at that same year’s Society of Artists exhibition? Why was he not a founder member of the new august institution?

The Royal Academy was founded in December 1768 by George III at the behest of a small number of artists and architects. Membership was limited to 40, meaning more than 160 members of the Society of Artists did not make the cut. The Society had formed only eight years earlier, in 1760, as a way for Britain’s leading artists to meet, converse, study and exhibit together in London. It’s hard to imagine but there were no regular public exhibitions of art before this time. Art was shown to discerning patrons in artists’ studios and viewed in private collections in aristocratic homes. The Society changed this and, for a shilling (around £5 today), anyone could scrutinise the finest paintings of the year. At its peak, it had more than 200 members, including the country’s leading landscape painter Richard Wilson, the ‘grand manner’ portraitist Joshua Reynolds and the architect William Chambers, who would later design the Great Room of the Royal Academy. It also included younger artists such as the American painter Benjamin West and the history painter Nathaniel Dance, as well as Wright himself and his friends John Hamilton Mortimer and Ozias Humphry. These young men were finding their feet by exhibiting in this new annual mixed exhibition. Wright was 30 when he was elected a member of the Society in May 1765, the year his first ‘candlelight’ painting, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765), was exhibited to favourable reviews. While he was known as a portraitist in his home town of Derby, where he lived and worked, it was his ambitious candlelight paintings that significantly raised his profile in the capital.

Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765) by Joseph Wright. Courtesy Derby Museums

Wright’s friends in London were young and opinionated artists, who were members of the Howdalian Society, but his circle in Derby was older and more scientific. John Whitehurst, a horologist and geologist, lived at 22 Iron Gate, a few doors away from Wright at number 28, while Peter Perez Burdett, a cartographer and son of an instrument maker, lived in Full Street. Burdett was so familiar with Wright that he often borrowed money from him (and never seemed to pay him back). Many of Whitehurst’s friends – including the doctor Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Darwin) and the potter Josiah Wedgwood – were associated with the Lunar Society, a group of industrialists and natural philosophers who met regularly in Birmingham.

The Lunar Society gathered on the Monday closest to the full moon. Their choice of date is often interpreted as travel related, the full moon offering the best light for journeys home after lengthy meetings. But these inquisitive men (and they were all men) chose the name of their society with care. Most were members of the Royal Society, the prestigious scientific organisation founded in London in 1660, and were fascinated by astronomy, engineering and the latest developments in chemistry and physics. The Moon was linked to Earth’s tides, and the race was on to solve the problem of measuring longitude at sea (not least because there was a £20,000 prize on offer for the first person to do this accurately). Meanwhile, the orbits of Jupiter’s moons were already used to measure longitude on land. Wright would allude to his allegiance to the Lunar Society from 1768 onwards by painting a full moon visible........

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