Joseph Wright of Derby is a painter “all too often underserved in accounts of British art”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent . Born in Derby in 1734, he trained in London but returned to the Midlands to capitalise on the money flowing into the region in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

A “prodigiously gifted” artist, he developed a style inspired by Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro technique, painting scenes that blended “heightened realism” with “powerful contrasts of light and shadow”, as well as portraits and landscapes that flattered the local industrial elite and their domains. Yet while several of his paintings have become renowned as “seminal” images of the British Enlightenment, he is – possibly on account of the “parochial suffix” attached to his name – often remembered as “a

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