The National Gallery of Victoria is home to four paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–97), one of the most talented and innovative English painters of the eighteenth century. Two of those works – a dashing self-portrait from the 1760s and a hushed candlelit portrait of his daughter Anna Romana – were presented to the NGV in 2009 by Mrs Alina Cade in memory of her late husband, Joseph Wright Cade, a descendant of the painter.
The two donated portraits were probably intended as mementoes, a purpose for which they served the artist’s family for over two hundred years. Living as he did in an era before public art galleries came into existence, Wright could never have imagined that these two family portraits would end up in a major art museum on the other side of the world. Nor could he have predicted that they might one day be investigated with techniques that would enable viewers to learn what lies beneath their surfaces. Had he known, Wright might well have chuckled to himself in the knowledge that Anna Romana’s portrait contained some peculiar characteristics certain to confuse future viewers and researchers.
The first major discovery came via radiography, which revealed that the finished work covered an earlier painting, evidently another portrait, probably of a male subject.
The ghostly head of the sitter in the earlier portrait, lying directly beneath that of Anna Romana, is lit from the left and appears to be surrounded by long curls of hair. This hairstyle was not in keeping with fashions during Wright’s time, raising the possibility that the artist had recycled an older canvas for his own use. Wright presumably had access to old, unwanted paintings through his occasional work as a picture restorer. It is possible that the earlier painting was no longer presentable because of damage or deterioration to its surface: transmitted infrared photography of the painting revealed a partially degraded paint surface in the lower left, which may have affected its appearance. Another scenario is that an old canvas may have simply been available to Wright, saving him the cost of purchasing new materials.
Wright’s penchant for reusing old canvases by other artists has been previously documented, most notably in a landscape from the 1790s entitled Cut through the Rock at Cromford, which was painted over an earlier landscape. A bizarre feature of the Cromford painting is that Wright retained particular details – two horses and a wagon – from the previous painting, incorporating them into his own new composition. A close examination of the paint layers of the Anna Romana portrait found this to also be the case, where much of the dark olive-green background behind the subject was actually the same background of the earlier portrait. It is a mystery why Wright would choose to do this when it would have been far easier to start afresh by covering the entire surface of the earlier painting with a new priming layer. If his choice stemmed from a wish to save on materials and time, this surely would be a false economy given the extra effort required to blend together the old and new parts of the composition. It is not uncommon to find examples of paintings applied over older compositions but it is very rare for the artist to incorporate parts of the older painting with the new one, particularly when the earlier work is by a completely different artist.
How could we know for sure that the earlier portrait was by another artist? Because Wright carefully and deliberately left the earlier artist’s signature on the painting! Undiscovered until recently, and barely visible in normal viewing light is an inscription in black paint, neatly encased by Anna Romana’s jewellery box painted by Wright. It reads: ‘H: Vander Myn’.
Hidden signature of Herman van der Mijn behind Joseph Wright of Derby’s Anna Romana Wright reading by candlelight c. 1795.
This inscription is in fact a signature corresponding to that of the Dutch painter Herman Van der Myn (c. 1684– 1741). Van der Myn was a painter of portraits as well as floral and history paintings who was active in London between 1721 and 1741. The canvas repurposed by Wright is similar in many respects to Van der Myn’s own self-portrait, with the long-haired sitter illuminated from the left, shown wearing a similar white stock tied around the neck. Van der Myn’s self-portrait is on a canvas almost identical in size to the one used for the painting of Anna Romana.
The fact that Wright retained Van der Myn’s signature and did not leave one of his own suggests that he may have wanted to play a trick on future viewers. Indeed, our first response on discovering the signature was to examine the possibility that the painting was not actually by Wright but Van der Myn, however it quickly became clear that there was no confusing the styles and techniques of the two artists.
A final curious aspect to the Anna Romana portrait is Wright’s evident reworking of the flesh tones. Close study of the paint surface reveals two contrasting techniques at work, suggesting the painter returned to the work at a considerably later date. The earliest passages, which include the arms, eyelids, nose and around the mouth are all applied in relatively thin, carefully blended layers of paint, creating a porcelain-like finish. By contrast, the brightly lit forehead, brow and chest of the sitter were applied over existing flesh tone in brushy textured paint, creating a stronger contrast in tone. Though integrated with skill, they suggest that some considerable time elapsed between the start and completion of this family portrait. Wright’s correspondence has revealed that the painter’s working life was interrupted during the last decades of his life by bouts of depressive illness, and that he was prone to reworking, or to use his term, ‘cooking up’ older, unfinished works. The NGV’s portrait bears hallmarks of being ‘cooked up’ by Wright.
Joseph Wright was famously interested in scientific and technological advances in the age of the Industrial Revolution. Though we can only speculate as to his motivations for the many unusual features in his daughter’s portrait we can be sure that he would have been an amused and interested onlooker to our modern efforts to bring his idiosyncratic painting process and hidden secrets to light.
This article was originally published in NGV Magazine Issue 16 May-Jun 2019
Carl Villis is Senior Conservator of Paintings at NGV