13th april 2004
portrait of a man

Joseph Wright - Self portrait in a black feathered hat

I'd never seen this until today, although Wright is one of the greats of British painting, transferring Caravaggio's techniques to the England of the industrial revolution. He's best known of course for An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, although my favourite picture of his is the recumbent portrait of that darlin' man, Sir Brooke Boothby.
Here, in this charcoal self-portrait done in his early thirties, he looks much younger - he obviously fancied himself in that hat, and resembles a face glimpsed in a goth pub on Portobello road, in the shadows of the lounge bar.

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