Tricks of the light at Yale

Wright's Liverpool work is subtle and unsettling

"Two Girls Decorating a Cat by Candlelight" shows Joseph Wright's interest in candlelit scenes. (Courtesy of English Heritage, Kenwood House, London)

NEW HAVEN - Sometimes a single picture can make all your prejudices fall in a heap. If you occasionally succumb to the idea, for instance, that English painting has little to offer before the ascendancy of Constable and Turner, or that the 18th century - give or take a few Frenchies like Watteau and Chardin - was a frivolous and formulaic period, put such thoughts on hold as you take a trip here to see "Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool," a superb exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art.

Wright was one of the greatest painters in England in the second half of the 18th century, but he is overshadowed today by his more stylish contemporaries, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds.

There is much to like about him. But some pictures go beyond liking, and so it is with "Two Girls Decorating a Cat by Candlelight."

When I first saw this picture in London's Kenwood House, where it usually hangs, I didn't know whether to laugh or to flee. But I bought the postcard, and I frequently pull it out for a furtive look, if only to answer my mind's persistent query: Did I really see that?

"Two Girls Decorating a Cat by Candlelight" is an accurate title, which is one thing, at least, to be grateful for. Everything else about the painting feels unstable, and potentially anarchic.

The girls in question are probably between 8 and 12 - it's hard to tell. The cat is a kitten they have forced to stand on its hind legs as if it were a doll or a little boy (note the phallic protrusion of the tail between its legs). These three sentient beings are joined by a fourth, extremely unnerving presence: a female doll lying on the polished table, on its back, arms akimbo.

Candlelight, as we all know, can make almost anything strange. Influenced by Rembrandt and the Dutch Caravaggists of the previous century, Wright made his reputation with paintings of candlelit scenes, and by 1770, when this painting was made, it's clear he had mastered the art. (Mind you, he wasn't above a bit of eccentric experimentation: Another, related painting, called "Two Boys Blowing Up a Bladder by Candlelight," has traces of silver leaf beneath the brightest parts of the image - an experiment which backfired, since it made the surface highly unstable).

In the painting of the girls with the kitten, the actual light source, near the center of the image, is blocked by the girl's arm, which is cast into silhouette and finely limned by white light, with occasional flares of pink-tinged translucency. Were the arm to move just a fraction, the whole scene would be drastically altered, and our awareness of this compounds the sense of instability.

But this picture would be deeply strange even in daylight. It's true that the subject fits into a long tradition of images of children both tending to and tormenting little cats, as they rehearse the pleasures and responsibilities of adulthood. And it's also true that Wright's interest in candlelit scenes reflected a burgeoning interest in scientific inquiry rather than either the mysticism it suggested to that earlier master of candlelight, Georges de la Tour, or the kind of occult spookiness it suggests to modern eyes.

But tradition and intentions seem hardly to matter here. The scene is too immediate. Notice how close we are made to feel to these odd goings-on: It's as if we had just opened the door. Both girls are smiling and seem unperturbed by our entrance, which has the odd effect of implicating us in the scene. Even stranger, the girl in the foreground seems not to be looking up at us - which she would if we were adults - but smiling slightly down on us. Is Wright trying to reduce us to the level of child-accomplices?

Who knows? He is certainly inviting a moral reading. But what makes Wright bracing, here and in several other paintings depicting scientific experiments, artists societies, and even an alchemist's workshop, is not just that the moral message is left open-ended. It's that it is effectively overtaken, both by his consummately handled visual effects and by the many contradictions of his historical moment, which can always be felt just below the surface.

This show focuses on just four years in Wright's career - the years he spent in Liverpool between 1768 and 1771. Liverpool was booming at the time, and it wasn't long after moving there that Wright, who was already famous, was accused of "swallowing up all the business" by his jealous rivals.

The "business" primarily meant portraits. Thus, the majority of the paintings, prints, and drawings in this show are portraits (Wright painted on average one every nine or 10 days). Some, it must be admitted, are a little stiff, but most are brilliantly executed. All, at any rate, were commissioned by wealthy local families, many of whose fortunes were closely connected to the slave trade (Liverpool, at that time, was the commercial center of the slave trade).

Here, then, is one of the historical contradictions at the heart of Wright's art. For just as Wright was painting superb portraits of men like the 95-year-old Richard Gildart - merchant, ship owner, three times mayor of Liverpool, and slave transporter - he was also befriending many of the most important early abolitionists, including Erasmus Darwin (Charles's grandfather) and Thomas Day (co-author of "The Dying Negro").

Darwin, whose portrait by Wright appears in this show, visited Jean-Jacques Rousseau when Rousseau stayed in England, and it's likely that Rousseau's ideas about childhood - specifically its importance in the formation of a moral conscience - leaked into Derby's paintings of children.

One of the most intriguing of these (it gets a whole essay to itself in the catalog) is called "A Conversation of Girls," and it shows two white girls in classical garb beneath a Grecian urn. Before them kneels a black girl holding a basket of flowers.

Dark-skinned slaves of all ages appeared frequently in European art of the period - usually as signifiers of exoticism or of the wealth of their owners. Here, however, something unusually subtle is going on.

The interplay of the three figures is extremely intricate. The middle girl looks out at us with a wistful half-smile as she takes the flowers which are in fact being offered to the girl on the right. This girl's back is to us, but she meets the gaze of the black girl. Her expression, which we see only in profile, is hard to characterize, but - with pursed lips and flushed cheeks - it is clear she is thinking hard about something, and quite possibly feeling the first prick of moral conscience.

Sarah Parsons, in her essay on this painting, is careful not to claim too much for it. After all, whatever his personal feelings about slavery (and we know nothing about them), Wright had to be sensitive in his handling of such issues if he wanted to avoid offending his wealthy slave-trading clients.

But Wright had an ability, as was once said of Edmund Burke, to wind his way into a subject like a serpent. The subject in question might be the Industrial Revolution. It might be the divorce of ethics and scientific inquiry. Or it might be the slave trade. But again and again Wright showed that he was prepared to inquire rather than declaim. He framed questions rather than providing answers, and tried not to patronize his audiences by pandering to what they already knew.

Is it too much, then, to propose this painter of wealthy slave traders as a role model for political artists today? Crazy, I admit, but why not?

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com