An Air of History: Joseph Wright's and Robert Boyle's Air Pump Narratives
Abstract
This article offers a new account of Joseph Wright's celebrated painting, Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), by identifying the painting's overlooked anomaly: the anachronistic air pump at the center of the composition. The glass globe containing the white cockatoo, I argue, evokes Robert Boyle's first experimental vacuum, the machina Boyleana, 1659, and the seventeenth-century tradition of vanitas still life painting. The tensions between scientific and religious conceptions of emptiness, which the painting stages, inform Wright's experiment with an equivocal visual idiom and approach to history painting that simultaneously seeks to capture the discursive complexity of a cultural moment and situate that cultural moment in history.
Repository Citation
Baudot, Laura. Fall 2012. "Air of History: Joseph Wright's and Robert Boyle's Air Pump Narratives." Eighteenth-Century Studies 46(1): 1-28.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication Date
Fall 1-1-2012
Publication Title
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Department
English
Document Type
Article
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2012.0075
Language
English
Format
text
