While many argue that "modern art" began in the 1800s, could it actually have started with Joseph Wright of Derby's An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, nearly a century before?

What is "modern art"? It seems like a simple question, but critics and art historians have quarrelled about it for decades without agreement. Nor is there any consensus about which artwork marks the turning point between "traditional" and "modern".

Many point to the 1800s – and paintings like Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863) by Édouard Manet, Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844) by JMW Turner, and The Third of May 1808 (1814) by Francisco Goya, who was described by the art critic Robert Hughes as "the first modern artist and the last old master".

A new exhibition at the National Gallery in London reminds us that there is another contender in the ring. It's a painting that has some of the key ingredients of modern art, decades ahead of its time: Joseph Wright of Derby's An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768).

It depicts a science experiment. Oxygen is being pumped out of a glass vessel containing a white cockatoo. Spectators, cloaked in the peripheral darkness, are transfixed by the life-or-death drama unfolding in front of their eyes. Wright has orchestrated his scene to as a chain reaction, with a pivotal event at the centre sending shockwaves of emotion through the spectators.

At the centre is a scientist with one hand on the valve which allows air in and out of the glass container. On the table is the air pump. The spectators react to the spectacle of the suffocating bird in different ways. On the left, a young couple seem more interested in checking each other out than the experiment. On the right, two young girls react in horror at the act of animal cruelty. The men nearest us seem able to control their horror. A young boy in the back lowers a curtain to block out the moonlight. The other light source in the scene is a lantern in the centre, hidden behind a jar containing a human skull.

So, what exactly is "modern" about this scene?

First there is Wright's remixing of art historical tradition, taking familiar poses and lighting techniques and repurposing them for a contemporary scene.

This is something that the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire would declare as a defining feature of modern painting in his essay The Painter of Modern Life in 1863: blending the "ephemeral" changeability of the modern world with the solid, "eternal" qualities of great art from the past. Édouard Manet exemplified this approach in Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863) which depicted a modern-day picnic but with figures based on Raphael's Renaissance artwork The Judgment of Paris (1510-20).

But Wright can be seen doing this almost 100 years earlier. In An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Wright riffs on canonical scenes depicting religious miracles. A striking comparison can be made with Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus (1601), which is also on display at the National Gallery.

The exhibition's curator, Christine Riding thinks that Wright developed his Caravaggio-like handling of light and dark because the London art world at the time was so competitive. "He was entrepreneurial and came up with a signature style. And I don't think anyone dared do the same because he was so good at it –........

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