Steve Farnsworth: Painting Faces: Being a Life of that Capital Artist, Joseph Wright of Derby

Sunday 19 July 1:30pm, Old Library, Derby Museum & Art Gallery DE1 1HS

The exhibition Wright of Derby: From the Shadows will be held at the Art Gallery from 13 June - 1 November 2026.

Steve’s novel presents Joseph Wright for the first time as the complex, compromised character his life and work reveal him to be.  

Painting Faces tells the story of a unique talent and an extraordinary career. No other 18th Century artist has the range and variety of Wright, and his story spans both the cultural currents of the London of his day, the rise of the industrial behemoths of the textile and manufacturing dynasties then being created, the sparkling intellectual life of the ‘Lunaticks’ and his own struggles with his health, his hypochondria and his depressions. 

Painting Faces breaks new ground in bringing into the light one of Britain’s most iconic artists, a man never sure whether he had understood the journey from hack portrait painter to that of a genuinely liberated and leading artist. Like his exact contemporary George Romney, who also features in the novel, Wright approached the end of his life unsure that he had even achieved much at all. But he can lay some claim to the creation of some of British art’s most sublime images.