Museum accessions - Joseph Wright's 'Self-Portrait' painting

Magazine Antiques, June, 1999 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

In late January the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, reopened after being closed for nearly a year for repairs to the roof. Just before it closed, the museum acquired the extremely important Self-Portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, one of the masters of the Enlightenment in Britain. An artist who has defied categorization because of the range of his subject matter, which included portraits, landscapes, genre, and history paintings, Wright was described in his own day as a "very great and uncommon genius." Fascinated by the nuances of light, he explored sunlight and moonlight, candlelight, firelight, the light of fireworks, and even the eerie light of an erupting Vesuvius, always painting with a precision of brushstroke and line that has rarely been matched.

Lost from view since 1934, the Self-Portrait was rediscovered at the sale of the collection of the Cade family, descendants of the artist. It shows Wright at the height of his career and is a probing and contemplative likeness. In the floppy hat, play of light and shadow, monochromatic palette, nascent signs of age in the face, and introspection, the portrait is convincing justification for Wright's appellation as the Midlands Rembrandt.

The painting was acquired with funds provided by Paul Mellon, the founder of the Yale Center for British Art, who died earlier this year. In the words of Patrick McCaughey, the museum's director, "Wright of Derby is one of Paul MelloWs artists." His collection of the artist's works, now in the Yale Center, makes the museum the largest repository of Wright's work outside the United Kingdom.

Among Mellon's other artists, as reflected in the Yale Center's holdings, were William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Richard Wilson, Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, and Richard Parkes Bonington. But his favorite was George Stubbs (1724-1806), and to honor its founder, the Yale Center has organized a show entitled George Stubbs in the Collection of Paul Mellon: A Memorial Exhibition. On view until September 5, it brings together Mellon's collection of Stubbs's work, which he dispersed over the years to a number of museums in this country and abroad, including the Yale Center, to which he gave 15 paintings and some 125 drawings in his lifetime. His final bequest will bring an additional group of Stubbs's works to the museum.

Mellon bought his first Stubbs, Pumpkin with a Stable Lad (1774), in 1936, when the artist was largely considered nothing more than a horse painter. Mellon spent the next fifty, years reviving appreciation for both Stubbs's rare genius as a passionate and compelling portrayer of animals and for his extraordinary talents as a technical innovator. The breadth of his genius is clearly visible in the 41 paintings, 75 drawings, watercolors, and prints, and 7 rare books in the current display

John Moultrie III, a native of Charleston, South Carolina, accompanied his loyalist father, Dr. John Moultrie Jr. (1729-1798), to England at the end of the Revolution and lived there for the rest of his life. He inherited the estate Aston Hall in Shropshire from his grandfather, and with his Charleston-born wife, Catherine Gaillard Ball (1766-1828), lived the opulent life of the English gentry, as can be seen in the high-style portrait illustrated here. It was painted about 1792 by John Francis Rigaud, an artist of Huguenot descent who was born in Turin, received his early training in Italy, and then worked in France before moving to England in 1771. There he found success not only as a portraitist but also as a painter of historical and literary subjects and as a decorative painter, receiving many commissions for ceilings and other architectural schemes.

The portrait remained in the hands of descendants of John Moultrie and Catherine Ball until the 1980s, and has recently been acquired for the Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston with funds provided by the Moultrie and Ball families, which are still prominent in that city.