Case Study 2: Wright of Derby: “The Rev. Thomas Wilson and his Adopted Daughter”

Joseph Wright of Derby

A more familiar artist represented in the PMC photo archive is Joseph Wright of Derby. Here again, the Centre’s photographic archive can prove invaluable as a source of visual and textual information in tracing the history and vicissitudes of various works in the artist’s oeuvre. One example will suffice here: a portrait of The Reverend Thomas Wilson, D.D. and his adopted daughter, Miss Catherine Sophia Macaulay. In 1968, when Benedict Nicolson published his seminal book, Joseph Wright of Derby. Painter of Light, published by the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, the picture in question was not accorded an entry in his catalogue raisonné; the reason being that the whereabouts and physical appearance of the painting was unknown.¹ Indeed, its existence was confirmed only via a letter from Wright to his brother, written from Bath towards the end of April 1776, stating that he was at that time “painting a half-length of Dr. Wilson & his adopted daughter, Miss Macauley [sic]”; Wright adding that it was undertaken “for reputation only”.²

In December 1984 the painting emerged from a private collection, when it featured in a sale by Phillips, the London auctioneers. An image of the painting taken at the time is shown on a mount in the PMC archive (Fig. 1). The mount also contains a series of hand-written annotations made by the Centre’s staff recording the painting’s subsequent movements through the hands of the dealer, Colnaghi, as well as Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses. When it was sold by Christie’s in New York in 1996, the Centre acquired another photograph of the painting (Fig. 2). A comparison between the two images reveals that since 1984 the painting had clearly undergone conservation, notably the removal of the inscriptions at the top left and right with the sitters’ names and dates. Clearly, the inscriptions had been added at a later date, probably in the nineteenth century, and their removal may have been predicated by a feeling that they detracted from the image, and quite possibly also because the birth and death dates given for the young girl (1735–1791) were factually incorrect, and referred erroneously to the sitter’s mother, also Catherine Macaulay, the celebrated historian, who was then lodging with her daughter at Dr Wilson’s house in Bath.³

Since the latter photograph was taken there have been additional chapters in the picture’s history. In 1996 it was purchased for The Centre for the Study of Early Women’s Writing at Chawton House, Hampshire. Recently, in 2018, it was purchased from Chawton by the London-based art dealers, Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd. There it underwent surface cleaning, and as Jonny Yarker noted, it was revealed in the course of the cleaning that the inscription had not in fact been removed but painted over (Fig. 3).⁴ The decision was then made to remove it completely, restoring the composition to its original state.

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Footnotes

1. Benedict Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby. Painter of Light, 2 vols, The Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art: London, Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York, Pantheon Books, vol. 1, p. 226..↩︎
2. For background on the context for painting and the sitters see Amina Wright, Joseph Wright of Derby. Bath and Beyond (exhibition catalogue), Holburne Museum, Bath, and Derby Museum & Art Gallery, 2007, pp. 35, 37–43..↩︎
3. Catherine Macaulay’s dates are in fact 1731–1791. Her only daughter, Catherine Sophia, who is represented in the present painting, was born in 1765 and died in 1821..↩︎
4. Verbal communication to the author by Jonny Yarker, 16 June 2021.↩︎