Dovedale by Moonlight

Celebrated for his dramatic candlelit scenes of modern scientific subjects, notably Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768; National Gallery, London), Joseph Wright of Derby is also known as a portraitist, history painter, and accomplished landscape artist. Wright's earliest known landscapes date from about 1772, shortly before he traveled to Italy from 1773 to 1775. Much of Wright's work captures natural phenomena in sublime or picturesque landscapes, or communicates a sense of spellbound awe and mystery.

The River Dove, a tributary of the Trent, runs through a narrow valley of limestone gorges in Derbyshire, in the East Midlands of England. The area has attracted tourists for centuries-Byron, Tennyson, and Ruskin all praised its beauty. Eighteenth-century guidebooks, and in particular James Pilkington's A View of the Present State of Derbyshire with an Account of its most remarkable Antiquities (1789), appreciated Dovedale:

Justly celebrated for its wild and fantastic appearance .!.!. you are struck with rocks of the most singular and extraordinary shape. In some places, they are seen rising up to the perpendicular height of thirty or forty yards in the form of pyramids, or spires of churches and entirely detached from the sides of the vale. In other parts, they lean over the river, and seem to threaten immediate destruction to everyone who passes by them.

The natural limestone feature of Tissington Spires (named for the nearby village), and the full moon reflecting on the waters below, are focal points of this quietly evocative landscape. Even today, Dovedale- now a protected National Nature Reserve- is one of the most-visited natural sites in all of Britain.

Wright painted at least five different views of Dovedale, in which he explored its dramatic topographical effects at various times of the day. One painting recorded in Wright's account book-signed in the same manner as the Oberlin painting-is presumably its pendant: "A View in Dove Dale Morn. Companion in Do. Moonlight 3 qrs sold to Ed Mundy Esqr., £31.10. each." Although this entry is undated, it is almost certainly a reference to the AMAM painting being purchased from the artist by Edward Mundy, a member of the prominent Mundy family of Markeaton Hall, near Derby, who commissioned several portraits from the artist.

A classic illustration of eighteenth-century England's ideas of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque, Wright's painting is used extensively in a wide range of Oberlin College courses in art, literature, history, and the sciences. The many interpretations and readings of the picture range from its rocky spires as expressions of romantic cathedrals to social commentary that notes that Derby-just beyond the peaceful valley seen here-was a major site of industrialized England's cotton mills, which irrevocably changed the landscape of the countryside.