David Olusoga ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’

The 18th-century artist Joseph Wright of Derby is not as famous as he should be, but the painting he is perhaps best known for is An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, from 1768, which features in episode eight of Civilisations. Wright of Derby was brought up in the Midlands and was fascinated by the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment sciences that underpinned it. In Bird in the Air Pump he captures, in a truly theatrical painting, that part of the century when science itself was popular theatre.

Like a lot of people, I think I first came across the painting in a school history text book. The action takes place in the home of a well-off family. The gloomy space is dominated by a visitor, a travelling scientific demonstrator, then sometimes called “natural philosophers”. Almost all of the light in the painting comes from a single source, a candle behind a glass jar, but the drama comes from within another glass vessel.

Air pumps and the phenomenon of the vacuum were old-hat by the 1760s, but there was one favoured experiment that still drew crowds and drew breaths, and this is what is happening in this strange, atmospheric painting.

In a glass bell jar is a cockatoo – which might well be the treasured pet of the two little girls seen gazing, horrified, at the experiment. What the scientist is doing is demonstrating the power of nature by pumping air out of the jar, slowly suffocating the cockatoo. What turned it into theatre was exactly what made it cruel: the suffering of the bird. The true drama stemmed from the big question; would the scientist, at the end, release the valve and save the creature?

It is tempting to read too much into the painting, but it does raise questions about science and ethics that we’ve been struggling with since the scientific and industrial revolutions transformed our world.