The British tech entrepreneur Matt Clifford delivered a 14-minute speech at a recent gathering in London organised by Looking for Growth, a new political movement that seeks ‘to push Britain out of decline’.  It has become a social media phenomenon, gaining more than half a million views on X alone. More a rallying cry than a profound analysis, it appeals nevertheless to Britain’s history of innovation and enterprise, born of dynamic public debate and free association, that gave the world the scientific and industrial revolutions, inventing modernity in the process.

The likes of Clifford and Looking for Growth’s founder Lawrence Newport believe that such a moment can happen again given the right circumstances. And this desire, necessarily urgent, chimes with a new, small, but superbly curated exhibition at London’s National Gallery: Wright of Derby: From the Shadows.

Joseph Wright was born in the East Midlands market town, with which he is forever associated, one that holds a fine collection of his work, much of it on display here. Derby, though little celebrated, is home to one of Britain’s remaining industrial powerhouses, Rolls Royce, whose engines power about a third of the world’s widebody aircraft. It is a still-thriving legacy of the Industrial Revolution, built on observation and experiment, whose milieu Wright was among the first to record. It is the world of Birmingham’s Lunar Society, with which he was acquainted, home to such free-thinking giants as Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood (Oxford and Cambridge universities, who barred such dissenters, were all but moribund at the time). The name ‘Lunar’ was adopted because the society gathered on evenings when the moon was full, but it took on wider associations of a British Enlightenment, outlined by the historian Roy Porter, which privileged the empirical – what does work – over the rational – what should work – preferred on the Continent. Its fruits would prove spectacular.

Out of the Shadows is centred around one of the National Gallery’s own paintings, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1786), in which Wright’s obsession with light, in especially stark contrast, is evident. In The Air Pump, a ‘mad professor’, who looks remarkably like Isaac Newton, stares straight ahead, as a bird – an exotic, rare cockatoo – trapped in the air pump’s glass dome, hovers between life and death. Two young girls react with grief and shock; and we never know if the bird survives. Here is the same God-like power, invested in the scientist, depicted soon after in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Wright’s world is also one of wonder and curiosity. His other masterpiece, A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun – usually just The Orrery – depicts the momentous metal model of the phases of the moon named after the Irish Earl of Orrery. Next to this sublime ‘candlelight’ painting stands the real Grand Orrery, hardly less an object of wonder two centuries on.

Wright’s typical medium is an extreme form of chiaroscuro, known as tenebrism, after the Italian for ‘darkened’ or ‘obscured’, and derived from the late work of Caravaggio, who died in 1610, and cast a spell on artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi. Wright is a technically dazzling master of the form: the Gazeteer, a contemporary journal, described him as ‘a very great and uncommon genius, in a peculiar way’. Less commented upon is the affecting hyperrealism of Wright’s faces, a legacy of his original vocation as a portrait painter, who trained under Thomas Hudson, a mentor, too, of Joshua Reynolds.

One of the exhibitions many strengths is the way its curator, Christine Riding, places the proudly provincial Wright within the London art world of his time, in which Reynolds was primus inter pares, though still strongly dependent on the legacy of William Hogarth at the time that Wright first exhibited in the capital in 1765. The National Gallery stands at what would once have been the heart of the printing industry that did so much to disseminate the works of artists such as Wright, who, like so many, was a beneficiary of the pioneering commercialism of Hogarth.

A new public sphere was being created at this moment – the pursuit of knowledge was nothing without dissemination – and Wright mastered one of its principal agents of communicating images: the mezzotint. Thought of at the time as a peculiarly English form, smooth and silky, and rich in tonal subtleties, the mass-produced mezzotint made the most of the tenebrous nature of Wright’s work. A self-portrait, revealing a face of bashful melancholy, shows the form off beautifully.

And yet, Wright’s time in England was cut short by his desire, like those of so many of his compatriots, to head to Italy. Though growing in confidence in so many fields, when it came to the visual arts, Britain suffered from a cultural cringe. As Dr Johnson wrote: ‘Sir, a man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from him not having seen what it is expected a man should see.’ Indeed, Wright’s London debut display at the Society of Artists had been The Gladiator, a study of a classical statue being studied itself by a trio of figures including Wright himself. It was a herald of his Italianate longing; his very style, distinctive but rooted in the schools of Rome and Naples, owed much to Plato’s dictum that ‘light is knowledge of the true’, hence the constant theme of the luminous emerging from darkness.

Perhaps this exquisite exhibition could make more of the connection between Wright’s work and the emerging new world it observes, that of industry and innovation, of discovery and dissemination, of Enlightenment. But, as is correctly pointed out, that would be to view the past through hindsight: the term Industrial Revolution, for example, was not coined until a century after Wright. He, his contemporaries, and his subjects, had no obvious plan, but they had the freedom and the will, and, most importantly, the curiosity to prosper, and they remain an inspiration from which we may yet still profit.

Wright of Derby: From the Shadows will be displayed in the Sunly Room at London’s National Portrait Gallery until 10 May 2026.