在这本期待已久的书中，Matthew Craske以全新的视角审视赖特，他认真地考虑了当代关于他的忧郁症和神经质的报告，并继续质疑对这位艺术家的公认理解。长期以来，Craske被视为一个典型的现代和进步的人物——英国启蒙运动艺术领域的偶像之一，他颠覆了对这位艺术家的这种传统看法。他证明了在一定程度上，与其说赖特是科学进步的代言人，不如说他是一个忧郁和喜欢怀疑的局外人，他越来越多地退缩到一个孤独的乡村世界，进行哲学和诗意的思考，而他的艺术视野也相应地变得黑暗和令人沉思。

Craske对这位艺术家的画作，包括他最**的一些杰作，提供了一系列新的、有影响力的解释。在此过程中，他找回了赖特对风景、对孤独的快乐和痛苦以及对时间、历史和死亡主题的密切联系。

A revelatory study of one of the 18th century’s greatest artists, which places him in relation to the darker side of the English Enlightenment

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797), though conventionally known as a ‘painter of light’, returned repeatedly to nocturnal images. His essential preoccupations were dark and melancholy, and he had an enduring concern with death, ruin, old age, loss of innocence, isolation and tragedy.

In this long-

awaited book, Matthew Craske adopts a fresh approach to Wright, which takes seriously contemporary reports of his melancholia and nervous disposition, and goes on to question accepted understandings of the artist. Long seen as a quintessentially modern and progressive figure – one of the artistic icons of the English Enlightenment – Craske overturns this traditional view of the artist. He demonstrates the extent to which Wright, rather than being a spokesman for scientific progress, was actually a melancholic and sceptical outsider, who increasingly retreated into a solitary, rural world of philosophical and poetic reflection, and whose artistic vision was correspondingly dark and meditative.

Craske offers a succession of new and powerful interpretations of the artist’s paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces. In doing so, he recovers Wright’s deep engagement with the landscape, with the pleasures and sufferings of solitude, and with the themes of time, history and mortality.

In this book, Joseph Wright of Derby emerges not only as one of Britain’s most ambitious and innovative artists, but also as one of its most profound.