Joseph Wright of DerbyStorbritannien, 1734–1797Two Boys with a Bladder
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The painting depicts two young boys, boldly lit by a concealed candle, inflating a pig's bladder. At the time, animal bladders served as toys, either inflated and tossed like balloons or filled with dried peas and shaken like rattles. In European art, bladders often functioned as symbolic variants on soap bubbles, fragile playthings signifying the brevity of human life and the transience of human achievement. Although bladders were depicted frequently in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, they were less common in eighteenth-century British art, and Wright has taken liberties with the motif. The elaborate costumes—with their frilled collars and cuffs—worn by the boys seem to be of the artist's own invention, in the style of contemporary British "fancy pictures."
J. Paul Getty Museum
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- Inventarnummer
- 2020.20
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- J. Paul Getty Museum
- Billede: J. Paul Getty Museum — Open Content
Imens i livet hos Joseph Wright of Derby
Hele livet1760–1773
Meets Wedgwood and Priestley
While living in Derby, Wright came to know the potter Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the Wedgwood company, and the chemist Joseph Priestley; he attended the scientists’ experiments and depicted them in drawings and paintings. Wedgwood, together with the industrialist Richard Arkwright, became one of Wright’s two most important patrons.
1764–1767
The deaths of his mother and father
The painter’s mother, Hannah Brookes, died in 1764, and his father, John Wright, an attorney and the town clerk of Derby, in 1767.
1768–1771
Liverpool: portraits and the name “of Derby”
Wright spent a productive spell in Liverpool painting portraits of prominent citizens and their families. It was then that he became known as Wright “of Derby”, to distinguish him from the artist Richard Wright, also based in Liverpool.
