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What is it like to watch a living creature die? What—if anything—can it teach us, and at what cost? These questions lie at the heart of Joseph Wright of Derby’s celebrated painting, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768). Wright’s canvas has often been read in relation to eighteenth-century cultures of science, sentiment, and sociability. In this lecture, I explore its connection to another, less evident cultural form: the spectacle of capital punishment. In this era, public executions were routine, widely seen, and intensely visual events. Yet they have largely eluded art historical analysis, in part because they were rarely pictured directly in works of “high” or fine art. Air Pump offers an unexpected window into these rituals, at once illuminating the kinds of suffering they inflicted and mirroring the various and frequently contradictory modes of spectatorship they engendered. In doing so, it tests the limits and possibilities of painting in Wright’s moment, and engages with matters that remain of vital concern today.
