The Times learned that an immortal painting by Joseph Wright of Derbyshire, sometimes referred to as the "Industrial Revolution Painter" and "Enlightenment Painter" of Britain, is negotiating to lend it to the Huntington Library in San Marino , Art museum and botanical garden.

This painting is an "experiment of a bird in an air pump", which is a dramatic scene involving a large number of characters witnessing life-and-death scientific tests. Wright painted this painting in 1768, when he was 34 years old.

The reciprocal loan will be exchanged for Thomas Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy", which will begin a four-month controversial exhibition at the National Gallery in London in January. Wright and Gainsborough were British contemporaries who worked in the late 1700s.

One of the nine international protectors of paintings by European classical masters who met in Huntington in 2018 warned against traveling to the iconic Gainsborough and claimed that this 250-year-old fragile canvas has a potential risk of structural damage .

Huntington officials continued to make loan arrangements on the grounds that they were approved by a second team of three North American museum curators and three unidentified conservators the following year. According to a Huntington spokesperson, members of the 2019 team were guaranteed anonymity to encourage them to talk about the plan freely.

Melinda McCurdy, director of the British Art Gallery at the Huntington Art Gallery, described Wright's paintings as "sublime masterpieces." In a telephone interview, she said that if the loan agreement is reached, the museum hopes to build a small exhibition around the scientific themes at the core of Wright's paintings, including 18th-century British scientific works from the Huntington Library's extensive collection. collect.

Also possibly included is Wright's hot landscape painting of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a carefully enlarged version of what he might have witnessed during his visit to Naples, Italy in 1774. This painting was acquired by Huntington in 1997.

A spokesperson for the National Gallery could not be reached.

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Officials at the Huntington Museum of Art loaned the fragile painting to the National Gallery of England, thus vetoing the advice of their conservation experts.

Wright's painting "Experiment of a Bird in an Air Pump" dates back to 1768 and is roughly the same as the "Blue Boy" created around 1770. At 6 feet x 8 feet, Wright's much larger canvas brings a huge scale historical painting to an unusual contemporary scene.

Six adults and four children formed a circle around a table in a temporary science laboratory and witnessed an unstable experiment in which air would be drawn from a large glass container to form a vacuum . Children have different fears and curiosities. Adults meditate, think, warn children to pay attention to and imitate the drama of the experiment.

The focus is the white cockatoo near the apex of the composition in the container, sure to be suffocated to prove that there is no air in the vacuum. Shiratori is an exotic and expensive product imported from its native Australia or the South Pacific, where the British Empire began to expand. Shiratori alludes to pigeons.

The Christian symbol of the Holy Spirit succumbed to the power of science, natural law, and empire here. Above it was the hand raised by the naturalist, who looked straight ahead and faced the question of life and death. A young couple on the left is indifferent to the mystery of the laboratory, but pays attention to each other, deducing the mystery of human love.

The "experiment of the bird in the air pump" is the so-called "candle painting", which is dramatically illuminated by the flame behind the glass beaker hidden on the laboratory table. It appears to be a lung specimen—or, some people think, a dissolved skull—floating in the light-diffusing liquid in the beaker.

Wright transformed Caravaggio's dramatic chiaroscuro lighting technique (popular as a religious metaphor for spiritual lighting in the 16th and 17th centuries) into a metaphor for rational enlightenment.

Although trained in London, Wright mainly worked in Derby. He was born in 1734 and died in 1797. He belongs to a group of intellectuals known as the Lunar Society, who meet every month on the night of the full moon. Outside the window of the paintings of the National Gallery, a bright moon gleams in the cloud-filled indigo blue sky.

As the first major British artist to not open a studio in London, Wright is often labelled the "King of Derby". Located in the central industrial area of ​​England, the city was a wealthy 18th century center for natural history research, scientific experimentation, and ever-growing factory production. It is located 125 miles north of London. Among his clients and colleagues are Josiah Wedgwood, who industrialized pottery production, and Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of a doctor, botanist, poet, and evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin.

In addition to "Vesuvius from Portage" and the artist's three paintings, Huntington's permanent collection also includes two other paintings on Wright's easel.

Last year, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood added "two boys with bladder" to two canvases in its collection. The newly rediscovered Wright candle painting at the Getty Museum shows the light emitted by a toy made from an inflatable pig bladder.

The then British Minister of Art, Helen Whately, tried unsuccessfully to prevent the export license, saying it was "critical" to prevent the painting from leaving the UK. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic began to close, the painting was on display at the Getty Palace.

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"Los Angeles Times" art critic Christopher Knight (Christopher Knight) won the 2020 Pulitzer Critics Award (he was shortlisted for the award in 1991, 2001 and 2007). In 2020, he also won the Art Journalism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rabkin Foundation.

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