Sensibility and Science

Motherhood and the Gendering of Knowledge in

Two Mezzotints after Joseph Wright of Derby

Louise Siddons

“True Wit consists in the Resemblance of Ideas,” wrote Joseph Addison in 1711.
His essay, titled “True and False Wit,” began with a quotation from John Locke
in which the philosopher emphasized the distance between wit and reason.
“Men who have a great deal of Wit,” Addison quoted, “have not always the
clearest Judgment, or deepest Reason.”1 Eighteenth-century artists, printmak-
ers, and publishers often exploited what they understood to be the inherent
wittiness of mezzotint.2 Structurally related to linguistic wit, the specifically
visual wit of mezzotint derived from its use primarily as a reproductive me-
dium and was expressed through a range of doublings, pairings, mistransla-
tions, metaphors, and transformations. It is particularly striking that through-
out the eighteenth century this wittiness was often gendered and put to work
to undermine claims of rationalism and reason. In this essay I investigate two
mezzotints after paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby, published in London
by John Boydell in 1769, that demonstrate an unprecedented level of gendered
visual wit. A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery, engraved by William
Pether in 1768 (fig. 1), and A Philosopher shewing an Experiment on the Air
Pump, engraved by Valentine Green in 1769 (fig. 2), both depict an extended
family group in a darkened interior, focused on a scientific demonstration. In
each print, an elderly male scientist-philosopher directs the action as three
generations look on. Ostensibly deployed in the service of an exploration of
science, education, and wonder, the wittiness of the two mezzotints reveals
the instability of eighteenth-century British scientific epistemology when it
came into contact with gendered expectations regarding marriage and child-
birth. Boydell’s decision to publish the two prints together in his 1769 collec-
tion of prints engraved “after the most capital paintings in England,” and the
status of the “experiments” Wright depicted as entertainments rather than in-
novations, encourage us to read these mezzotints as cultural metaphors rather
than scientific documents.3 Critical to my rereading of these mezzotints after

124 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

Fig. 1. William Pether after Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery, 1768. Mezzotint engrav-
ing, 48 x 57.8 cm (sheet). Copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.
Fig. 2. Valentine Green after Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Shewing an Experiment on the Air Pump, 1769. Mezzo-
tint engraving, 48 x 50.5 cm (sheet). Museum purchase, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund. Cour-
tesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Wright is an acknowledgment of the ways in which the transformation into
print also transformed the potential audience for these images, and thus their
reception and interpretation.4
I first came to these prints with what I thought was a simple question: Why
is the mother absent from these intimate family groups? Scholarly answers to
that question have typically been dismissive, treating Wright’s compositions
as simply illustrative of a social fact. The art historian David Solkin, for ex-
ample, has suggested: “Bourgeois wives and mothers . . . were not supposed to
put themselves on public display, nor to indulge in preoccupations that might
distract them from their domestic duties—so it would have been improper
for Wright to show them (though not single females) attending scientific lec-
tures.”5 Careful analysis of Wright’s compositions, however, especially as they
are reproduced in mezzotint, reveals that far from being an accident of social
history, the absent mother is at the center of the images’ meaning. She was,
moreover, at the heart of an intricate web of cultural conversations in the mid-
eighteenth century that encompassed not only gender, marriage, astronomy,
and colonialism but also the nature of truth, scientific knowledge, and the
power over life and death.
Reproductive prints were a vital tool for creating artistic celebrity, as
painter Joshua Reynolds acknowledged when, upon seeing James McArdell’s
mezzotints after his work, he declared, “By this man I shall be immortalized.”6
Unsurprisingly, painters famous for their portraits of women eagerly took up
mezzotint reproduction as a means of spreading their fame. “Classy female
pulchritude was to remain a recurring preoccupation of mezzotint engrav-
ers with John Smith, John Faber the Younger, James McArdell, James Watson,
Valentine Green and John Raphael Smith all producing prints of aristocratic
‘beauties of the age’” after paintings by famous portraitists, notes art historian
Ben Thomas.7 The result was that audiences began to conflate the medium
with its subject, and mezzotint became irrevocably associated with female
beauty in the eighteenth-century imagination despite its use in a variety of
other contexts as well. As mezzotint and female portraiture became increas-
ingly linked in the public imagination, it was considered particularly appro-
priate to commission portraits of women on occasions such as a wedding en-
gagement, when they were allegedly at the most perfect state of femininity as
wives and (ideally) future mothers. Birth portraits were also popularly com-
missioned and sent out to personal connections; and images of women with
their children became fashionable.8
Audiences feminized mezzotint not only because of its subject matter but
also because of its form. The stylistic and technical qualities of mezzotint,
specifically, were universally described in a critical language that was deeply

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 127

 feminizing. “It has introduced  .  .  . a softness and delicacy before unknown
in prints,” enthused James Chelsum in 1786.9 Eighteen years earlier, William
Gilpin had declared definitively that “there are three kinds of prints, engrav-
ings, etchings, and mezzotintos. The characteristic of the first is strength; of
the second freedom; and of the third softness.”10 Chelsum echoed this sen-
timent but hastened to add, “though it may not lay claim to strength, or to
greatness of character, . . . it must be allowed surely to possess peculiar beauty.
Nothing, except paint, says an able critic, can express flesh more naturally, or
the flowing of hair, or the folds of drapery. . . . Mezzotinto gives us the stron-
gest representation of a surface.”11 This emphasis on the superficiality of mez-
zotint was sometimes anthropomorphic in tone; French critics used language
like “frailty” and “lack of strength,” even describing mezzotint as “clean, free
of dirtiness and unpleasant odors.” In other words, as printmaking historian
Norberto Gramaccini notes, “the rude ‘masculinity’ of etching” was con-
trasted in eighteenth-century texts with “the ‘feminine’ weakness of mezzo-
tint.”12 The seventeenth-century Dutch painter and theorist Gérard de Lairesse
went so far as to create an elaborate metaphor that transformed the medium
into a blushing virgin:
Here you see a young and plump virgin, of a fresh complexion and ami-
able countenance, dressed in black velvet, lined and faced with sky-blue
powdered with gold glittering stars. She has a broad gold girdle embroi-
dered with black bats which diminish towards the arms. Her head at-
tire is wanton and modish, adorned here and there with small flowers.
About her neck is a gold chain to which hangs a medal, exhibiting a
burning altar, and these words, magnae brittaniae. In her right hand
is a small tool, like a lancet, together with a feather; and in the left a ta-
ble, whereon is painted an head on a black ground, representing Nature.
She poises airily on one leg, as if she were dancing.13
De Lairesse’s personification of mezzotint reveals the extent to which the me-
dium was understood in feminizing and nationalistic terms.
The mezzotints after Wright’s paintings are neither portraits nor primar-
ily of female subjects, however. In fact, in a period during which audiences
overwhelmingly calibrated their expectations of, and reactions to, a work of
art based on its adherence to anticipated genre conventions, Wright’s compo-
sitions were deliberately genre-bending. The art historian Ellis Kirkham Wa-
terhouse observes concisely that Wright’s paintings “fell outside of any of the
categories of contemporary appreciation.”14 On the level of genre, the failure
of Wright’s compositions to conform to a single category can be linked di-
rectly to the question of the feminine. Just as in many conversation pieces,

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the group in both compositions is not limited to immediate family; friends
and relations are equally present. One figure, however, remains conspicu-
ously absent. In neither the Air Pump nor the Orrery is there a female fig-
ure that might plausibly be understood as the mother of the children present.
Instead, men dominate each group, attempting to perform roles that would
traditionally have been considered maternal: nurturing and comforting the
children as well as educating them. This takeover and erasure of the mother in
scenes of scientific inquiry is neither innocent nor accidental: Wright’s choice
of demonstrations, focusing as they do on educating children and adult men
about the moon (the Orrery depicts an eclipse) and the power over life and
death (the Air Pump shows a vacuum that suffocates the captured bird), are
heavily coded with contemporary concerns about women’s (reproductive)
bodies, Britain’s role in the global economy, and the transformative potential
of scientific knowledge. The wit with which Wright’s compositions marshal
these themes is enhanced—as he likely knew it would be—by their translation
into mezzotint, which had its own relationship to education, the moon, the
creation of light/life, and women’s bodies.
Art historians don’t often consider the scientific or mathematical diagram
as a genre in the same sense as landscape, still life, or conversation piece—
and yet it may be one of the most relevant generic allusions that Wright and
his printmakers create. In both the Orrery and the Air Pump, Wright uses the
dramatic chiaroscuro to compare scientific diagrams of the moon’s phases with
the effect of the candlelight on the faces of his encircled figures. This, too, is
a resemblance that is made more evident by the translation into mezzotint—
which, as we will see later, was at this very moment complicating the practice
of scientific illustration. Compare the mezzotinted faces in the Orrery, for in-
stance, to plate 7 in Fuller’s Practical Astronomy, which illustrates the ways in
which the sun illuminates planetary and lunar objects (fig. 3). This illustration
shows the phases of the moon, lit by an unseen light source—much as Wright’s
compositions disguise their sources of light. There are striking parallels be-
tween the circular groups in all three images, but if we focus on the Orrery,
we can actually align each lettered moon in Fuller’s diagram with a figure in
the mezzotint. In a sense, the Orrery is teaching us to see the figures in the Air
Pump as diagrammatic of the moon. In the Air Pump, although the figures are
similarly allied to the moon diagram, the philosopher is not fully lit as he is in
the Orrery; instead, the figures most fully lit are the cockatoo and the young
girl who looks upward toward it. We will return to them and to the signifi-
cance of their replacement of the philosopher in the position of the full moon.
The overt subject of both of Wright’s compositions is education in what
contemporary audiences would have recognized as its most modern form.

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 129

 Fig. 3 Artist unknown. Detail of plate 7, fig. 3 of Samuel Fuller, Practical Astronomy,
depicting the phases of the moon, 1732. Engraving, 21 cm (book). Courtesy of the
Newberry Library, Chicago. Call no. qb42.f85.

Consensus among those who weighed in was that education was most prop-
erly conducted in the home. Joseph Priestley—himself a schoolmaster—
argued for the direct control of children’s education by their fathers, and his
opinion aligned with Wright’s compositions in its exclusion of mothers from
this important social and moral responsibility: “I believe there is no father in
the world . . . who would think his own liberty above half indulged to him,
when abridged in so tender a point, as that of providing, to his own satis-
faction, for the good conduct and happiness of his offspring.”15 Priestley’s as-
sumption that education was the responsibility of fathers indicated the con-
straints placed on women’s participation in intellectual pursuits. Although
there were women who were active creators in the public sphere, they were

130 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

the exception rather than the rule. Most women found that their social power
was exercised primarily in choices about whether, and to whom, to be mar-
ried.16 And despite the fact that such choices were critical to industrial, eco-
nomic, and political ties, most women were discouraged from pursuing—and
were even actively denied access to—education in these realms.
Wright’s compositions are unequivocal in their support of this exclusion.
But when the compositions are reproduced in mezzotint, the change in con-
text changes the way in which Wright’s ideas related to wider iconographies.
The public sphere of print culture into which the mezzotints entered was in-
creasingly the venue for precisely those exceptional women who called for,
among other rights, equal access to education. In 1722, Elizabeth Thomas pub-
lished a poem that boldly accused men of restricting women’s access to edu-
cation out of fear:

Come, come, the real truth confess

(A fault acknowledged is the less),
And own it was an avaricious soul,
Which would, with greedy eyes, monopolise the whole;
And bars us learning on the selfish score,
That, conscious of our native worth,
Ye dread to make it more.17

To a certain extent Thomas’s plea fell on deaf ears: in 1797, poet and critic
Anna Laetitia Barbauld was still writing in condemnation of the “yoke of
wedlock,” which, according to her 1797 poem “Washing Day,” kept women la-
boring over domestic chores while the men around them had the freedom
to pursue scientific investigations. “So near approach the sports of children
and the toils of men,” she says derisively—but also enviously. Barbauld’s poem
implicitly makes the point that scientific advancement is dependent upon the
labor of women; looking at the mezzotints of the Air Pump and the Orrery,
some eighteenth-century viewers must have asked what labor was absenting
wives and mothers from the husbands and children engaged in such spectac-
ular studies. Turning to those studies themselves—the content of this male-
centered educational sphere—we find that they likely suggested an answer to
those viewers, albeit one that needed untangling.
The Orrery invites the viewer into an intimate space in which a family
group surrounds the titular machine. In the center, an old philosopher seems
to be in control. A close, although far more controlled, twin of his fellow in
the Air Pump, the philosopher gazes in a proprietary manner over the orrery
and the assembled group, his eyes resting on the man next to him, who is tak-

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 131

 ing notes. Below and between these two adults, a couple of children lean on
the table, peering into the intricacies of the solar system. The object of their
gaze holds a similar fascination for the young man seated at the right and a
young woman on the far left, while the final male figure completes the circle
by gazing up at the philosopher. The mezzotint (along with the original paint-
ing) thus offers us a series of age-based partnerships through which Wright
manipulates our gaze in order to create closure within the tightly knit circle.
At the center of this family circle is the orrery itself; and at the center of the
orrery is a demonstration of a lunar eclipse.18
Although each of the prints is quite witty on its own, my intent in this essay
is to argue specifically for their wit in conversation with one another—and it
is quite likely that without the Orrery’s insistence on the lunar we would con-
sider the moon in the Air Pump to be just as marginal to the action as it liter-
ally is in Wright’s composition. Despite the position of the moon outside and
only partially visible through window and clouds in the Air Pump, Wright in-
sists we notice its presence in his composition. The young boy whose gesture
toward the bird cage also points us toward the full moon pointedly breaks the
otherwise self-contained circular composition. Although the moon seems to
serve little narrative function other than explaining the darkness, it contrib-
utes to an atmosphere of romanticism that is then conferred back on the Or-
rery, despite the fact that the only visible moon in the earlier print is the tiny
sphere at the center of the machine. The juxtaposition of a scientific model
moon with an atmospheric counterpart was not unique to this pair of images.
Throughout the eighteenth century, the moon and the signs of the zodiac
were associated with the irrational and superstitious as well as the scientific.
In 1773, Boydell published John Dixon’s mezzotint after John Hamilton Mor-
timer’s An Incantation (fig. 4). Like Green and Pether in their mezzotints af-
ter Wright, Dixon has used his medium to full effect in enhancing the dra-
matic light effects of Mortimer’s composition. In the print, a crone-like witch
raises her arm, holding a wand, over a fire at the center of a circle that has
been inscribed in the dirt ground. At her feet, a young woman cowers at the
edge of this circle, away from a spot at its edge from which fire is beginning
to emerge—presumably at the behest of the witch’s incantation, itself visu-
alized as glowing light. (Dixon’s witch has something in common with the
artist himself, as well as with Wright, Green, and Pether: all are in the busi-
ness of creating light.) The circle is elaborated with signs of the zodiac, and
monstrous creatures fly in echoing circles overhead. Behind the witch, a skel-
eton holds open a book whose pages, we might initially suppose, contain the
words of the mystical incantation being recited. But our supposition is con-
founded: the book actually contains mathematical equations and geometric

132 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

Fig. 4. John Dixon after John Hamilton Mortimer, An Incantation, 1773. Mezzotint engraving,
65 x 52.8 cm (sheet). Museum purchase, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Bransten and Achen-
bach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco.
 figures! The iconographical slippage between mathematics and witchcraft in
this image echoes Wright’s insertion of Enlightenment scientific experiments
into dramatically lit interiors. In this sense, the prints of the Orrery and the
Air Pump are Enlightenment-era “inchantments.”19
Although Pether eliminates any inscriptions from the surfaces of the ma-
chine in the Orrery, the signs of the zodiac were ubiquitous on astronomical
tools. In his written description accompanying a fold-out engraved illustra-
tion by Richard Cushee of the Great Orrery, built in 1730 by Thomas Wright,
Samuel Fuller notes that
the Frame which contains the Wheel-Work, &c. that regulates the whole
Machine, is made of fine Ebony, and is near four Feet in Diameter; the
outside thereof is adorned with twelve Pilasters, curiously wrought and
gilt: Between these Pilasters, the twelve Signs of the Zodiac are neatly
painted, within gilded Frames. Above the Frame is a broad Ring, sup-
ported with twelve Pillars: This Ring represents the Plane of the Eclip-
tic, upon which there are two Scales of Degrees, and between those the
Names and Characters of the twelve Signs.20
The Great Orrery was the model for Wright’s orrery, and because images of
the machine were popular on trade cards, Wright likely saw engravings such
as Cushee’s relatively frequently.21 Another engraving by Cushee in Fuller’s text
(opposite the title page, and advertising Fuller as a vendor of “mathematical
books and instruments”) depicts a pair of celestial and terrestrial globes. Re-
inforcing this connection between astronomy and astrology, both globes are
circumscribed by a ring decorated with the signs of the zodiac. The repeated
inclusion of the signs of the zodiac on orreries, celestial globes, and other
instruments suggests that eighteenth-century viewers would have seen this
older form of celestial knowledge as appropriately juxtaposed, even if deco-
ratively, with more contemporary representations of astronomical knowledge.
The persistent presence of superstition extended to beliefs about the moon
itself. Noël Antoine Pluche complained in The History of the Heavens (pub-
lished in English in 1740) that “a simple kalendar [sic] . . . was converted into
a source of influences which multitudes of people will at this day not suffer
themselves to be disabused.”22 Pluche’s text delights in mocking all the ways in
which people persisted in beliefs about the moon that had clearly been refuted
by science. “If you will believe them,” he wrote, “it is the moon who regulates
the growing of our hair, the fulness of oisters and cray-fish, the success of all
that is sowed and planted, the course of our diseases, and the effect of medi-
cines. . . . They explain every thing without being at the trouble of reasoning, or
of understanding.”23 But what is most striking about midcentury discussions of

134 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

the moon, whether literary or visual, is not the presence of either the rational
or the romantic version but rather the continual juxtaposition of both.24
Just a few years before Wright devised his compositions, Sarah Scott’s 1762
novel, Millenium Hall, opened with a description of the titular Hall’s interior,
which included a large, communal sitting room: “Over against the windows
were three large book-cases, upon the top middle one stood an orrery, and a
globe on each of the others.” Perched atop bookshelves, these orbs are clearly
intended to symbolize the educational activities that take place in the room.
Various women sit in the room, engaged in art making: one paints “a beautiful
Madona [sic],” another is “drawing a landscape out of her own imagination,”
and a third is engraving.25 Their activity leads us to the second set of moons,
this time in romantic guise. Out in the grounds of Millenium Hall is a “tem-
ple dedicated to solitude. . . . In the temple is a picture of Contemplation, an-
other of Silence, two of various birds and animals, and a couple of moon-light
pieces, the workmanship of the ladies.”26 The rational, scientific model of the
moon and other planetary objects, all of which are conceptually linked to the
rationalizing order of the terrestrial and celestial globes that flank the orrery
in the Hall, contrasts sharply with the “moon-light pieces” outside, which as-
sociate the moon with solitude, contemplation, and nature. The narrator of
Scott’s novel, a visitor to the Hall, traverses these spaces of rationality and ro-
manticism in sequence, naturalizing their juxtaposition within this utopian
community of women.
Like Scott, Wright (and more importantly, Boydell, in his publication of
the two mezzotints together and directly in sequence) introduced the con-
tradiction overtly, following his scientific representation of the moon with a
painting that included a gothic, romanticized version of the satellite. In the
Orrery, the mechanized representation of the moon (observed rationally by
the group in attendance) is contrasted with the heightened emotional drama
created by the candlelight. In the Air Pump, the ambiguity of that contrast is
elaborated upon: although Wright once again hides his ostensible light source,
he adds the full moon overlooking the proceedings through the window—
and his characters are far more emotionally expressive.
As commentators criticized mezzotint for lacking strength, so did philos-
ophers increasingly describe the moon. Pluche, in his discussion of supersti-
tions regarding the moon, dismissively wrote, “the light of this planet [sic]
collected at the focus of a burning-glass cannot raise the liquor of a thermom-
eter a hair’s-breadth.”27 As John Wilkins had observed in the previous cen-
tury, Pluche argued that the moon’s lack of ability to produce its own light
was clear evidence that the moon lacked any power of its own. The overlap of
connotations shared by the moon and the medium of mezzotint doesn’t end

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 135

 with these shared perceptions of their powerlessness, though—they are both
also gendered feminine. Mezzotint, as we have seen, was gendered primarily
through language that described it as weak, soft, delicate, and beautiful—but
also in de Lairesse’s striking personification of mezzotint as a regal, British vir-
gin. The moon (Fuller refers to “her” throughout his description of the Great
Orrery), meanwhile, was personified as a queen, in consort with the sun-as-
king. For example, in a text that was reprinted throughout the first half of the
eighteenth century, titled Secrets merveilleux de la magie naturelle, an illustra-
tion of the seven planets designed “to be engraved on talismans” depicts the
sun as a king and the moon as a female figure, implicitly a queen.28 The sun
and moon were often described as a heterosexual married couple, for instance
by theologian William Turner: “The Sun and Moon represent a Husband and
Wife. . . . And ’tis very certain, the Moon depends entirely upon the Sun for all
its Light, and attends in its Motion as becomes an obsequious Bride.”29
In a move that had implications for both mezzotint and the moon, light
and enlightenment were also often gendered. “Women are for the most part
harder to be weaned from the . . . foolish ways of the Multitude, than Men,”
wrote Thomas Tryon in a book of aphorisms published at the end of the sev-
enteenth century. He explained that women remained attached to supersti-
tious beliefs because they rarely had “the deep sight of the Divine and Natural
Mysteries, for the profound and penetrating does arise from the bright flash
of Light, which is higher Dignified, and the property of Fire more exalted in
Men than in Women; whence greater abilities for Strength, Power, Under-
standing, Judgment and Government do arise or proceed.”30 Just as the moon
could not produce its own light, women did not possess sufficient “fire” to
produce the “bright flash of Light” necessary for the perception of truth. The
analogy between the planets and gendered family structure extended to famil-
ial feeling: Henry Home, Lord Kames, in his 1762 Elements of Criticism, wrote
of men’s affection for their children,
Every man, beside making part of a greater system, like a comet, a
planet, or satellite only, hath a less system of his own, in the center of
which he represents the sun darting his fire and heat all around; espe-
cially upon his nearest connexions: the connexion between a man and
his children, fundamentally that of cause and effect, .  .  .  becomes the
completest that can be among individuals.31
Significantly, one of the most important members of the family—the moth-
er—is just as absent from Lord Kames’s text as she is from Wright’s composi-
tions. Ironically, Wright’s depiction of the familial solar system displaces the
father from Lord Kames’s model. As the comparison with Fuller’s Practical

136 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

Astronomy diagram made clear, both the father figure and his stand-in, the
philosopher, are orbiting bodies, reflecting rather than generating light. Along
with everyone else, they receive their glow from a hidden source which is the
light of science as well as that of romantic superstition. Thanks to the instabil-
ity of Wright’s compositions, the obscured light in both works is aligned with
other absences—most notably, that of the mother.
In the Orrery, Wright uses a figure in the foreground as a stand-in for the
viewer, as a block for the light source, and as a character—a child—in the
family group. Depicted only in silhouette, this figure is a body that has been
vacated of intrinsic meaning; his outline (a kind of imaginative figure “0”) is
also his value as an individual. In the language of the eighteenth century, a
numerical zero was a cipher; and in the Orrery, both the moon and the boy
are characterized in this way. A cipher was not simply nothing, in this context;
rather, it was a valueless value; it created value through place rather than in-
trinsically (01 is very different in value from 10, although the zero, considered
individually, has an equivalent value in both cases). The Orrery depicts a lunar
eclipse—an event in which the intervening presence of the Earth blocks light
from the sun from reaching the moon.32 Total lunar eclipses reveal the moon’s
inability to produce light of its own—reinforcing, for eighteenth-century au-
diences, its lack of power and independence as a celestial body (and its femi-
nization). The overshadowing of the moon is literalized by the silhouetted fig-
ure of the boy, who eclipses the moon even as he himself is eclipsed.
The cipher-boy in the Orrery is visually paired with the figure of the philos-
opher, in a composition that insistently pairs figures. We might imagine this
shadowy presence to be mediated and permitted by the philosopher’s act of
patriarchal indulgence—but, like a moon eclipsing the sun, it seems to retain
a certain power of its own. Once we have seen this figure (for it takes a few
seconds for our eyes to acknowledge the visual void created by his body), his
silhouetted form remains insistently in the way of our gaze into the machine.
It seems extraordinary that Wright would have chosen to obscure the only
source of light and impede the viewer’s ability to see the very demonstration
that is the subject of the painting’s title. In the Air Pump, the silhouetted figure
is replaced with an empty space at the table, itself an absence that constitutes
a cipher. The philosopher, rather than being paired with another figure within
the composition, directs his gaze outward toward the viewer. Instead of im-
peding our sight, Wright leaves a gap through which we may join the group—
indeed, his composition insists that we complete the spiraling circle. This ges-
ture, like so much else in the image, is transformed by the shift from painting
to mezzotint: the philosopher is no longer looking at a private, male audience
of artist and patron, but is instead looking out at the heterogeneous crowd

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 137

 of the public.33 This crowd included, among others, precisely those married
women who were not supposed to be present at scientific experiments—and
who are conspicuously absent from the print itself.
In both prints, in fact, the absence of a mother figure is marked by a substi-
tute, either present or implied. Moreover, in both it is a figure paired with the
philosopher who serves as the sun-like figure of enlightenment. Solkin sug-
gests that the public nature of science made it inappropriate for mothers, and
scientific language was often used (as we have seen in gendered discussions
of the moon) to define, restrict, and even erase women in the public sphere.
Wright’s literal exclusion of the mother in both scenes, in other words, was
ideologically supported by pseudoscientific and mathematical language that
removed women from positions of power, authority, or knowledge through-
out eighteenth-century society. The notion of the moon as a cipher was
echoed in descriptions of married women in the eighteenth century—a dis-
covery that is unsurprising, given the many points of intersection between the
discourse surrounding the moon and that surrounding women. Marriage, for
women, was a paradoxical moment in which they might significantly increase
their social status while simultaneously becoming politically insignificant,
and while the former was hoped for, the latter was inevitable. The language
of mathematics and science was used ubiquitously by writers describing the
inequality of women, or their subordinate status, particularly in the context of
marital relationships. As Mary Wollstonecraft wrote at the end of the century:
“The laws respecting woman . . . make an absurd unit of a man and his wife;
and then, by the easy transition of only considering him as responsible, she is
reduced to a mere cypher.”34 Wollstonecraft was responding to assertions such
as those made by Sir William Blackstone, the noted English jurist, who wrote
in 1756: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is,
the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the mar-
riage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.”35
Wollstonecraft was not the only author to use the arithmetical term “cypher”
to describe married women; Samuel Richardson’s heroine, Pamela, also de-
scribes herself thus when anticipating her marriage: “Then shall I not stand a
single Mark of God’s Goodness to a poor worthless Creature, that in herself is
of so poor Account in the Scale of Beings, a mere Cypher on the wrong Side
of a Figure; but shall be placed on the right Side; and, tho’ nothing worth in
myself, shall give Significance by my Place.”36 Like the boy and the moon in
the Orrery and the Air Pump, wives throughout eighteenth-century society
became significant as placeholders devoid of any intrinsic value. The ciphers
in Wright’s compositions are thus imaginatively linked to eighteenth-century
understandings of the role of wives and mothers within the family structure.

138 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

Both mezzotints, moreover, presented audiences with a narrative in which the
absent mother was at one point undeniably necessary; the family group would
not be possible without a mother for the children. Depicting children without
their mother foregrounds the presence of her absence, bringing her insistently
to our mind, if not to our view.
Pamela’s witty mathematical metaphor and Wollstonecraft’s recognition
that linguistic slippage had serious legal implications reflect the fact that
wordplay was considered feminine—and more specifically, related to court-
ship and marriage—throughout the century. Addison’s treatise on wit, for
example, equated the (secondary, “false”) wit of wordplay such as punning,
rhyming, and so forth with “Female Ornaments.” Addison “reflects the con-
ventional construction of such materiality as feminine,” notes literary scholar
Elizabeth Kraft, and “compares such labors to courtship rituals.”37 (“I have
heard of a Gentleman,” says Addison, “who, when this Kind of Wit was in
fashion, endeavored to gain his Mistress’s Heart by it.”)38 Addison was writing
at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but we could make similar ob-
servations of novelist Jane Austen’s fictional characters—Emma Woodhouse,
Harriet Smith, and Mr. Elton—at the beginning of the nineteenth. Mr. Elton is
in romantic pursuit of the title character in Emma (1815), and when he learns
that she and her friend Harriet are collecting charades he brings them a puz-
zle whose solution is “courtship.” Emma mistakes Harriet for the recipient and
reacts with a mixture of enthusiasm for the sentiment and mockery for the
cleverness of the charade itself. When Harriet enthuses, “I do think it is, with-
out exception, the best charade I ever read,” Emma replies, “I never read one
more to the purpose, certainly.”39 Austen herself, of course, is wittily teasing
her reader, who knows by this point that Emma, rather than Harriet, is Elton’s
object; and so Emma’s perspicacity in solving the charades (at which Harriet
is hopelessly bad) is countered by her lack of awareness of Elton’s true motive.
And although Emma mocks the substance of Elton’s charade, she does not
mock the form itself; a full century after Addison associated wit and court-
ship, Austen’s characters do the same.
Control over marriage was important because it was a source of power
over inheritances in an economy that was still largely controlled by the in-
herited wealth of a relatively small elite. Women held a central place in this
system, which was “a complex of property, status, and social, political, and
economic interests affirmed through relationships of blood and patronage.”40
In simple terms, women were important because they reproduced. Through
marriage and childbirth, the family and its inherited wealth was preserved,
expanded upon, and consolidated. The family in general—and the reproduc-
tive woman in particular—was thus a necessary site for the production of legal

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 139

 and ideological social control. In literature, in law, and in these mezzotints af-
ter Joseph Wright, we see men trying to take control of reproduction. We have
already seen Blackstone’s legal assertion of male absorption of women’s bod-
ies and beings in marriage. Literary scholar Christopher Flint has observed
of eighteenth-century fiction that “fantasies about reproducing one’s power
through parthenogenetic means allow the male subject to circumvent biologi-
cal necessities.”41 In the case of Wright’s compositions, it is science, rather than
fantasy, that attempts to make this circumvention plausible. In contempora-
neous medical research, meanwhile, the supervision of pregnancy and child-
birth (if not its actual exercise) was increasingly becoming incorporated into
the (male) medical domain—and once again, printmaking was an essential
component of that shift.
The middle of the eighteenth century witnessed the publication of three
separate studies of pregnancy and fetal development, all of which included de-
tailed illustrations. The obstetric atlases published by William Smellie (1754),
Charles Nicholas Jenty (1758), and William Hunter (1774) were illustrated us-
ing engraving. Notably, Jenty’s images were reproduced in mezzotint rather
than line engraving—at precisely the moment when critics were suggesting
that mezzotint displayed a superior capacity for representing flesh, and espe-
cially women’s bodies, with precise realism. Historian of science Julie Doyle
has observed that these three texts—all British—confirmed that “the image of
the anatomized and dead pregnant female body was at the heart of ” surgical
claims to objectivity and scientific knowledge.42 Doyle suggests that the pri-
mary audience for these images was the classically trained medical establish-
ment. It is clear, however, that the images were seen and collected by a much
wider group of interested amateurs, who placed the images in diverse settings.
A 1767 auction catalog, for example, demonstrates the wide variety of pos-
sessions being sold from the estate of “an antiquarian.” The title page lists “A
Collection of Curious and Scarce Books, in English, Latin, French, and Ital-
ian, some Manuscripts; among which are a very fair and interesting one, relat-
ing to the Empire of Morocco, never printed. Prints, and Books of Prints. . . .
A Pair of Globes, Telescopes, and other Instruments; and a fine Model of the
Elizabeth Man of War.” Here we see evidence of the heterogeneity of interests
among Britain’s educated elite—but a shared discursive thread would have
connected all these instruments of exploration, education, and colonization in
the minds of contemporary readers.43 The listing inside continues with more
in the same vein: “An Orrery in a Mahogany Case,” “A Magic Lantern,” and a
pair of “Fifteen Inch Globes” are joined by a long list of print subjects that in-
clude landscapes, conversations, and histories. Mezzotints are listed in a dis-
tinct category, but also grouped by genre; and works of particular note are

140 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

named individually. Included among the latter are “The King and Queen in
large Mezzotinto” and, curiously, not one but two sets of “Dr. Jenty’s Demon-
strations of the pregnant Uterus of a Woman at her full Time, in six Tables,
as large as Nature.”44 Beginning with a nude female torso, evidently pregnant,
Jenty’s six images progress through representations of the fetus in utero, the
postpartum uterus, and an image of the uterus floating in space, detached
from the fragmented torso that appears in the other five images. Jenty selected
mezzotint on purpose, and in describing the advantages of the medium he
repeats many of the gendered tropes already familiar to us: “This method is
softer, and capable of exhibiting a nearer imitation of Nature than engraving,
as artists themselves acknowledge that Nature may admit of light and shades,
well blended and softened, but never did of a harsh outline.”45 The mezzotint
medium emphasizes the chiaroscuro of the images, heightening the sense of
drama compared to the equivalent line engraving from Smellie’s earlier series.
Jenty, like the other two surgeons, isolated the uterus from the rest of the
body. Doyle notes that this visual and medical rhetoric displaced women from
the process of childbirth—both the pregnant women themselves and also the
midwives, who would traditionally have supervised births. Doyle discusses a
midwife named Elizabeth Nihell, who in 1760 “published a wonderfully ironic
and scathing attack on Smellie (and other ‘men-midwives’) not only for his
advocacy of forceps but also for his teaching of midwifery through the use of
anatomical models, which she referred to as automatons.”46 Resentment over
masculine-scientific attempts to take over the feminine realm of childbirth,
along with Nihell’s particular invective against the “ingenious piece of machin-
ery” that substituted for actual women’s bodies in Smellie’s training program,
suggests that once again mezzotint—in the form of Jenty’s illustrations—is
at the center of a highly gendered debate about embodied scientific knowl-
edge. But the mezzotints must also have challenged the very claims of objec-
tivity and scientific rationality that Jenty was trying to make. Even a cursory
comparison reveals a dramatic difference between the line engravings, which
more radically fragment the uterus and fetus and which have only a minimal
sense of light and shade (creating an equally minimal sense of corporeal three-
dimensionality), and the mezzotints, which depict a full, fleshy body carved
open and laid out upon a surface for examination. The latter image produces
empathy—prompts in us, in other words, the same tension between fascina-
tion and repugnance that the suffocating bird in Wright’s Air Pump does. The
engraving is the visual equivalent of the “ingenious piece of machinery” sar-
castically described by Nihell; the mezzotint, meanwhile, is (at least in aes-
thetic terms) far more like Doyle’s “embodied propensity of the female towards
the art of midwifery.”47 Mezzotint, deployed in the service of reproducing sci-

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 141

 entific knowledge, undermined the very discourse of rational distance that it
sought to reproduce. The feminized machinery of printmaking ultimately con-
founded technologies of reproductive power and masculine control.
The air pump, too, was a technology with connotations of masculine con-
trol that had direct power over life and death. “The Honorable Mr. Boyle in-
vented a Pneumatic Engine, with the help of Mr. Hook, called the Air Pump,”
records William Turner, “by the Assistance whereof he hath . . . found out so
many new things relating to the . . . nature of a Vacuum, Flame, and excan-
descence of Coals . . . ; Fluidity, Light, Freezing, Respiration, &c. that to give
an Account of all . . . would be to Transcribe the Author himself.”48 Just as the
antiquarian’s 1767 estate created connections between objects and texts from
disparate origins, Turner’s list connects, through purposeful juxtaposition,
the effect of the air pump on light, life, death and darkness. In association
with The Orrery, the air pump’s connection to the control and extinguishing
of light may well have brought viewers back again to the discussions of mez-
zotint, moonlight pictures, and the moon itself. Numbering among its prop-
erties the ability to extinguish both light and life, the air pump was, moreover,
a powerful metaphor for both knowledge and reproduction.
Several scholars have noted that the Air Pump is about death; indeed, both
the threatened life of the cockatoo and the murky skull in the foreground
make that conclusion obvious. What the mezzotint makes exceptionally clear,
however, is that this image could also be understood in terms of the creation
of life, or, more accurately, the failed attempt to co-opt reproductive creation.
This vacillation is encapsulated in Wright’s presentation of a mysterious skull
that rests in the fluid-filled glass container on the table in the Air Pump. To a
certain extent illegible upon brief inspection, this skull seems strangely out of
place within the context of a simple chemistry experiment. The uterine/fetal
connotations of this element have been noted,49 and such a reading is made
more compelling by the ways in which it informs the tension pervading the
rest of the composition. A fetus that is also a skull, a symbol of death that is
simultaneously a reminder of pregnancy and potential birth, and a dark mass
that simultaneously eclipses and emphasizes the source of light—all captured
within the instruments of science—perfectly summarize the contemporane-
ous eighteenth-century debate in which scientific discourse attempted to im-
itate and co-opt the female reproductive body in order to assert rational con-
trol over the production of life. While the Orrery makes a general statement
about the family group and homosocial control of knowledge and education,
the Air Pump thus goes one step further. Wright’s composition links patriar-
chal education to the conflict between emotion and reason under the (inef-
fective) light of the moon in order to make a point about the subject of the

142 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

air pump demonstration. But the point, in the mezzotints, remains unclear:
Is it a celebration of man’s newfound ability to control life using science and
technology, or a condemnation of the arrogance of that belief? The answer to
this question depends upon the viewer’s perspective—and the translation of
the paintings into mezzotints makes the identity of that viewer, and thus the
meaning of the prints themselves, multiple and diverse.
An air pump creates a vacuum, and as such is primarily capable of extin-
guishing, rather than producing, life. In fact, eighteenth-century practitioners
went to some lengths to prevent the air pump from becoming disturbingly
associated with death. “The lecturer James Ferguson,” notes Stephen Daniels,
“who did a series of scientific demonstrations in Derby, and on whose drawing
of air pump apparatus Wright’s seems to be based, recommended substituting,
‘a machine called the lungs-glass in place of the animal’ for ‘this Experiment
is too shocking to every spectator who has the least degree of humanity.’”50
Wright’s refusal to make this substitution may be seen as a practical one; the
scene in the Air Pump would lose much of its drama if it did not involve a
threat to life. But more importantly, the use of a bird—and, moreover, a pre-
cious cockatoo that would have been a cherished pet—brings the question of
life to the foreground. What is more, the visual rhyming of bird with young
girl makes the drama of the moment even more powerful. Wright’s painting
captures the dilemma of reproduction so perfectly precisely because of his
lack of even a single “degree of humanity.” The artist is reduced to something
less than human even as the machinic “lungs-glass” is accorded the status of
proof-of-life.
In keeping with the ambiguities that we’ve seen in astronomical discourse,
scientific equipment had particular, feminine connotations in the eighteenth
century: “Contemporary writers and artists were quick to make surreal con-
nections between mercury and blood, glass and flesh.”51 Literary scholar Terry
Castle writes that these imaginary thermometers and barometers “suggest
nonetheless a deep tendency in Western culture since the Enlightenment to
animate the unfamiliar products of modern scientific technology with human
sentiments or capabilities.”52 I would amend her statement to say that these
“human sentiments or capabilities” are not just human but female and spe-
cifically maternal. Prints, of course, are also a technology, and education was
also being used to replace traditional forms of knowledge about reproduc-
tion (not coincidentally practiced by midwives who were women). That prints
were seen as a more perfect form of education than any other adds to the mul-
tiplicity of transformations, substitutions, and punnings in these mezzotints:
by this logic, the prints could be construed as becoming the mother that they
both apparently erase.53

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 143

 Michel Foucault has suggested the extent to which these individual exam-
ples were part of a larger politicization of technology developing in the eigh-
teenth century: “The emergence of ‘population’ as an economic and political
problem [had at its heart] sex: it was necessary to analyze the birthrate, the age
of marriage, the legitimate and illegitimate births, the precocity and frequency
of sexual relations, the ways of making them fertile or sterile.”54 The extent to
which the subjects of analysis relate directly to women’s bodies through the
governance of reproduction in Foucault’s assessment is noteworthy. While
he pays little attention to the gendered specificity of this “innovation,” it is
a critical consideration if we are to understand the eighteenth-century atti-
tude toward women and the production of knowledge. In part reiterating an
Enlightenment attempt to conflate powers of life and death, Foucault notes
the simultaneity of discussions about the production of life (birthrate, fertility,
illegitimacy) and that of death (sterility, contraception, and, later, abortion).
Equally important is his observation that information systems—the rational-
ization of knowledge—were central to this transformation. The inscription
of the female body within medical, legal, and cultural texts was pervasive
throughout the eighteenth century: while we could look at any number of ex-
amples of the institutionalization of reproductive knowledge, the illustrations
for André Levret’s 1749 text on the radical treatment of polyps in the womb,
throat, and nose include overtly masculine hands deploying tools that are
frankly terrifying—in close proximity to equally frightening polyps.55 The in-
tent of all these reinscriptions of the maternal body and its reproductive func-
tion into masculine control—whether literary, legal, medical, or visual—was
to reinforce assertions like that of Lord Kames, that “the connection between
a man and his children [is] fundamentally that of cause and effect.” And yet,
superstition and irrationality persist in Wright’s image and are exacerbated by
the transformation into mezzotint: the elder daughter in the Air Pump, whose
body recoils from the “scientific” slaughter of her pet bird, echoes the kneel-
ing figure in Dixon’s Incantation, who cowers away from the witch and her
circle of zodiac signs. Medical science, like natural philosophy, has become an
unnatural affront to human sensibility.
Interestingly, a satire of the medical profession was one of Wright’s sources
for the Air Pump. William Hogarth’s well-known 1751 engraving, The Reward
of Cruelty, depicts a dissection in an anatomy theater.56 In Hogarth’s print, a
skeleton in the background is that of a criminal, much like the one being dis-
sected on the table. The latter figure, Tom Nero, has been condemned to death
for murdering a maidservant; his body, like that of all victims of the death
penalty, has been donated to science. The boy can thus be read as referring
to a later narrative moment, when Tom Nero’s skeleton will adorn the walls

144 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

of the operating theater. Hogarth’s image is full of ambiguity: the dead man
seems eerily alive; the skeletons framing the scene point at one another; and
a dog chews on Nero’s heart, undermining any pretense of rational scientific
inquiry. Wright’s composition reverses Hogarth’s figure and attaches him to a
birdcage rather than a skeleton, but he is referencing the same debates about
science, rationality, and life (or death). It is, after all, the bird’s life that hangs
in the balance—the direction of the cage, up or down, is dependent upon the
action of the philosopher in the next few seconds. Wright visually links the
bird and the younger girl, through her gaze and hairpiece. By extension, then,
the girl’s life also hangs in the balance. Wright’s decision to use the bird is a
pointed reference to gender, transforming the experiment upon the air pump
from a rational demonstration of a scientific principle into an extended met-
aphor for female experience. He was not alone in this use of the bird—and
birdcage—as a metaphor for women’s experiences of love, marriage, mother-
hood, and domesticity; this imagery was one especially frequently deployed
in print media. Popular prints depicted caged birds as beloved pets in domes-
tic settings, linked to stories of engagement, marriage, and contented female
adulthood.57 But the metaphor was not always benign: feminist poets and phi-
losophers underscored the caged aspect of the metaphor for marriage, turning
the birdcage’s symbolism on its head in order to protest the limited scope and
constrained movement shared by caged birds and married women alike. In
the Air Pump, the bird has exchanged its everyday cage for one of a more rari-
fied nature—so rarified, in fact, that it will soon suffocate. Science has become
a cage that doesn’t just contain married women, but kills them (as Nihell and
others argued doctors who used forceps and other obstetric tools were doing).
What’s more, the exoticism of Wright’s cockatoo reminds us that the fight
for women’s freedom was often imaginatively and politically allied with the
anticolonialist fight for the abolition of slavery.58 Contemporary audiences
seeing the birdcage may have read it as an allusion to Lawrence Sterne’s star-
ling, in A Sentimental Journey, which cried out piteously to be freed, prompt-
ing the narrator to meditate on the evils of slavery.59 Women looking at the
print, familiar with Sterne’s starling and the marriage-as-birdcage trope, likely
connected the two when they saw the exotic bird and its transition from cage
to suffocating glass chamber. The control exercised by elite white men over
women, enslaved peoples, and animals in the name of scientific, economic,
and social progress is thus potentially called into question by Wright’s compo-
sition, and Green’s mezzotint—even as the production of both paintings and
prints was due, directly or indirectly, to patronage from wealth produced via
the raw products of enslaved labor, brought from the Caribbean and North
America to the Midlands factories owned by a newly wealthy gentleman-

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 145

 industrialist class. The young women in Wright’s paintings, in other words,
likely received significant privilege from the exploitation of the enslaved
workers to whom married British women were often likened in contempo-
rary discourse. Like almost every element of Wright’s images, the birdcage is
a complex and even contradictory signifier, dependent upon the particular
positions of individual viewers for its meaning.
In a society where death symbolized the ultimate masculine power over
the body, the death of the bird would paradoxically have implied the triumph
of masculine technologies of control—even as it simultaneously signaled its
failure. The outcome of this demonstration is, of course, unresolved—Wright’s
composition derives its drama from precisely that dilemma. Narratively
speaking, it will be the decision of the philosopher, who gestures out toward
the audience, commanding us to watch—or, perhaps, asking us to make the
decision for him. But who are we? Particularly in the case of Green’s mez-
zotint, the answer to that question is plural: all the participants in the public
sphere, however tangential or fragmented their access, were potential viewers
of this print and therefore participants in the experiment. In other words, the
viewer may well have been precisely the subject(s) Wright attempted to exor-
cise from his images: mothers. We have come full circle to the empty space
in the image, but the value of that cipher-space is destabilized, because the
changing value of the viewer—who they are, and what else they know—has
the potential radically to alter the way in which the image is read.60 Whereas
many discussions of the public sphere have emphasized its consolidating
function—making visible and authoritative certain community norms and
relationships61—these mezzotints after Wright reveal a polyvocality in the
public sphere that is conflicted, contradictory, and unstable. This was partic-
ularly true in precisely those areas where commentators were most invested
in asserting and establishing their authority, namely, where they concerned
themselves with education and reproduction. In both medium and iconogra-
phy, the mezzotints after Wright’s scientific candlelight paintings would have
sent mixed messages to their viewers. That mixture was the direct result of
contradictions that the painter set up between emotion and reason, science
and superstition. Upon translation into mezzotint, those contradictions were
put in dialogue with a broad, even uncontrollable range of related discourses
that allowed for witty—and wittily subversive—readings. Lord Kames sug-
gested at midcentury that art criticism could, “governed by just principles,
giv[e] scope to the judgment as well as fancy.”62 Throughout this essay, I have
suggested some of the ways in which, by giving in to the fanciful connections
prompted by wit, contemporary viewers of the Orrery and the Air Pump may
have produced unexpected judgments about Wright’s absent mother—and,

146 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

by extension, the impact of ideologies of science, education, and the colonial
imagination on the female body and mind.

Acknowledgments
This essay has its origins in seminars with Terry Castle and Bryan Jay Wolf
at Stanford University; I am grateful to the former for her encouragement to
pursue it for publication. That pursuit was made possible by funding from the
Newberry Library and the College of Arts and Sciences at Oklahoma State
University. I am particularly indebted to the staff at the prints and drawings
study room at the British Museum and the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic
Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and to Lucy Salt at the Derby
Museums and Art Gallery, for their extensive assistance during my research.

Notes
1. Joseph Addison, “True and False Wit,” The Spectator, May 11, 1711, n.p.
2. See also Louise Siddons, “‘An English Art’: Nationalist Rhetoric and Civic Virtue
in Valentine Green’s Mezzotint Portrait of John Boydell (1772),” British Art Journal 14,
no. 1 (Fall 2013): 71–80.
3. Several scholars have interpreted Wright’s paintings along these lines, including
Werner Busch, Joseph Wright of Derby, Das Experiment mit der Luftepumpe: Eine Hei-
lige Allianz Zwischen Wissenschaft und Religion (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschen-
buch, 1986); Judy Egerton, National Gallery Catalogues (new series): The British School
(London: National Gallery Company, 1998); Benedict Nicolson, Joseph Wright of
Derby: Painter of Light (London: Pantheon Books, 1968); and Elizabeth Barker, “New
Light on the Orrery: Joseph Wright and the Representation of Astronomy in 18th-
Century Britain,” British Art Journal 1, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 29–37.
4. Timothy Clayton, in several publications (for example, The English Print, 1688–
1802 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997]), and T. Barton Thurber, in “The Artful
Disposition of Shades”: The Great Age of English Mezzotints (Hanover, nh: Hood Mu-
seum of Art, 2010), have examined the contexts in which reproductive mezzotints,
and specifically prints after Wright’s paintings, operated. The importance of this trans-
formation can be seen in a comparison of Wright’s purposeful construction and ex-
ploitation of conventional gender roles, ably explicated by Susan Siegfried (“Engaging
the Audience: Sexual Economies of Vision in Joseph Wright,” Representations 68 [Au-
tumn 1999]: 34–58), with the interpretation I offer here.
5. David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in
Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 232.

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 147

 6. Quoted in Malcolm C. Salaman, Old English Mezzotints (London: The Studio,
1910), 3.
7. Ben Thomas, The Paradox of Mezzotint (Canterbury: University of Kent, 2008),
35. Green advertised his series in newspapers of the time: for example, an announce-
ment in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser on February 20, 1782, listed the
first seven mezzotints in a “Series of Beauties of the present Age, engraved from Pic-
tures painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds.”
8. Carol Wax, The Mezzotint: History and Technique (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1996), 73.
9. James Chelsum, A History of the Art of Engraving in Mezzotinto . . . (Winchester:
J. Robbins, 1786), 4.
10. Gilpin (1768) quoted in B. Thomas, The Paradox of Mezzotint, 74.
11. Chelsum, A History, 9–10. The “able critic” is William Gilpin.
12. Norberto Gramaccini, “La manière noire: Un sombre chapitre dans les relations
franco-anglaises,” in Ars nigra: La gravure en manière noire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,
ed. Caroline Joubert (Caen: Musée des beaux arts and Somogy, 2002), 92.
13. B. Thomas, The Paradox of Mezzotint, 4, quoting a 1778 British translation of de
Lairesse’s original 1707 Dutch Het Groot Schilderboek (The Great Book of Painting). The
complexity of this passage deserves additional attention, which is nevertheless beyond
the scope of this essay.
14. Ellis Kirkham Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530–1790 (1953; New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1994), 286.
15. Priestly quoted in Solkin, Painting for Money, 235.
16. Brian Lewis, The Middlemost and the Milltowns: Bourgeois Culture and Politics
in Early Industrial England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 112.
17. Elizabeth Thomas, “On Sir J—— S—— saying in a Sarcastic Manner, My Books
would make me Mad. An Ode,” in Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford An-
thology, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 40–42.
18. Solkin, Painting for Money, 225–26.
19. De Lairesse famously claimed that the aesthetic limitations of mezzotint made
it ineligible for every subject except, “portraits, night and candle-pieces, specters
and inchantments, apparitions, flowers, fruits.” Quoted in Joubert, Ars nigra, 15; and
B. Thomas, The Paradox of Mezzotint, 5.
20. Samuel Fuller, Practical Astronomy, in the Description and Use of both Globes,
Orrery, and Telescopes. Wherein the most useful Elements, and most valuable modern
Discoveries of the true astronomy are exhibited, after a very easy and expeditious
Manner, in an exact account of Our solar system, with Ten curious Copper-Plates
(London: Samuel Fuller, 1734), 121.
21. Barker, “New Light on the Orrery,” 32.
22. Noël Antoine Pluche, The History of the Heavens Considered According to the

148 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

Notions of the Poets and Philosophers . . . , trans. J. B. De Freval, Esq., 2nd ed. (London:
Printed for J. Osborn, 1740), 2:10.
23. Pluche, The History of the Heavens, 2:10.
24. For the rational/scientific moon, we might note John Russell’s late-eighteenth-
century pastel of the moon, with its intricately rendered drawing of the moon’s sur-
face, as seen through a telescope; we could also turn to dozens of astronomical studies,
models, and diagrams. The Great Orrery itself, as well as lesser models, exemplifies
this approach, as does the popularity of Fuller’s Practical Astronomy, designed to be
“for the use of young students.” For more examples of the association of the moon
with solitude and heightened emotion, we might turn to literature: Mary Wollstone-
craft’s 1788 novella, Mary, for example, describes a setting in which “twilight always
reigned—it seemed the Temple of Solitude; . . . when the foot sounded on the rock, it
terrified the intruder, and inspired a strange feeling” (Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, ed.
Janet Todd [London: Penguin Books, 1992], 11); or to the visual arts: John Dixon’s 1773
mezzotint after Mortimer’s An Incantation links moonlight to the emotion and irra-
tionality of witchcraft—and Wright himself painted many moonlit scenes in this vein.
25. Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall, ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough,
Canada: Broadview Press, 2001), 59.
26. Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall, 69.
27. Pluche, The History of the Heavens, 2:10.
28. Secrets merveilleux de la magie naturelle & cabalistique du Petit Albert [pseud.],
traduits exactement sur l’original Latin, intitulé Alberti Parvi Lucii Libellus de mirabili-
bus naturae arcanis . . . (Lion: Les Héritiers de Beringos fratres, 1743), 59.
29. William Turner, A compleat history of the most remarkable providences . . . (Lon-
don : John Dunton, 1697), Part III: 18.
30. Thomas Tryon, Wisdom’s dictates, or, Aphorisms & rules, physical, moral, and
divine . . . (London: Printed for Tho. Salusbury . . . , 1691), 121.
31. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (New York: Collins and Han-
nay, 1830), 40.
32. Solkin, Painting for Money, 225–26: “They are probably being shown the work-
ings of an eclipse”; Derby Museum and Art Gallery website: “A light has been placed
in the position of the sun, probably to demonstrate the causes of eclipses.” Barker has
offered counterevidence for this interpretation of the scene, noting that neither the
Earth nor the moon is shown in eclipse—but she acknowledges that Wright’s title
would have implied eclipse to knowledgeable viewers (“New Light on the Orrery,” 34).
33. Although Wright painted both of these works for public exhibition rather than
as commissions, his intent was to inspire patronage by men. As a result, and because
even the audience at London exhibitions would have been much narrower and less
diverse than the potential audience for the mezzotints, the shift in audience was one
that Wright may have anticipated. I do not believe, however, that he intended the op-
positional reading I propose here.

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 149

 34. Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom:
The Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983),
60.
35. Bell and Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom, 33.
36. Quoted in Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations
in Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 194.
37. Elizabeth Kraft, “Wit and The Spectator’s Ethics of Desire,” Studies in English Lit-
erature 45, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 634.
38. Kraft, “Wit and The Spectator’s Ethics of Desire,” 635.
39. Jane Austen, Emma (London: Richard Bentley, 1882), 67.
40. Gary Kelly, introduction to Scott, Millenium Hall, 12.
41. Flint, Family Fictions, 132.
42. Julie Doyle, “Anatomy of the Womb: Imag(in)ing Reproduction in the Dis-
course of Surgery,” Women: A Cultural Review 17, no. 3 (2006): 312.
43. Interestingly, an undercurrent of colonialist sentiment ran through discussions
of printmaking, lunar investigation, and women’s rights throughout the eighteenth
century. There is much evidence of colonial trade in these two prints: the philoso-
pher’s silk housecoat and the white cockatoo, unheard of in Europe prior to 1760, are
two examples. The orrery, a tool of exploration, would likely have been associated
with the imperials tools of printmaking, gunpowder, and the compass listed by Rob-
ert Hooke in Micrographia; and artists and scientists were making references to lunar
colonization that were both satirical and entirely serious. William Hogarth’s satirical
print, Some Principal Inhabitants of the Moon, of 1724, mocks the very serious sugges-
tion made by Hooke in 1664 that the moon’s surface appeared to have arable land not
unlike “the short Sheep pasture which covers the Hills of Salisbury Plains” (Hooke,
Micrographia [London: Royal Society, 1664],242–43). Mezzotint in particular was of
course associated with Britain and its economic power.
44. Auction catalog printed for and published privately by W. Bristow, Fetter Lane,
London, 1767.
45. Jenty’s preface quoted in Doyle, “Anatomy of the Womb,” 318.
46. Doyle, “Anatomy of the Womb,” 316.
47. Doyle, “Anatomy of the Womb,” 317, summarizing the attitudes of eighteenth-
century midwives.
48. Turner, Compleat history, Part III: 7.
49. In almost every conversation I have had about this image, a colleague has made
this observation.
50. Stephen Daniels, Joseph Wright (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press,
1999): 40.
51. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the In-
vention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16.

150 Frontiers/2015/Vol. 36, No. 2

 52. Castle, The Female Thermometer, 23.
53. This notion is given credence by the frequency with which eighteenth-century
artists and writers were assigned maternal relationships with respect to their creative
work.
54. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990),
25–26.
55. André Levret, Observations sur la cure radicale de plusieurs polypes de la ma-
trice, de la gorge et du nez . . . (Paris: Delaguette, 1749).
56. Daniels, Joseph Wright, 41. Hogarth’s print of an anatomy theater is closely re-
lated to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century images of artists’ studios.
57. See, for example, A Country School Mistress (bm 2010,7081.921), Industry (bm
2010,7081.1158), The Family Concert (bm 2010,7081.1025), Affection and Innocence (bm
1873,0809.199), and Catullus and Lesbia (bm 1917,1208.1166), all of which associate
birds with women-centered family groups, domestic labor, and/or romantic love.
58. For an extensive discussion of this link, see Kathryn Kish Sklar and James
Brewer Stewart, eds., Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Eman-
cipation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
59. Scholar Mitzi Myers, for example, has noted the connection between Sterne’s
imagery and women’s situation in this period. Myers, “Portrait of the Female Artist
as a Young Robin: Maria Edgeworth’s Telltale Tailpiece,” The Lion and the Unicorn 20,
no. 2 (1996): 234. Moreover, Markman Ellis has noted the connection contempora-
neous audiences made between women, slaves, servants, and animals. Ellis, The Poli-
tics of Sensibiity: Place, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996). Deirdre Coleman explores the broader rhetorical
connections made by eighteenth-century writers between slavery and the patriarchal
oppression of British women in “Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and
English Women’s Protest Writing in the 1790s,” elh 61, no. 2 (1994): 341–62.
60. The idea that the identity of the viewer changes the meaning of the text is not
new and was most famously explored by Roland Barthes in his essay “The Death of
the Author” (1968), reprinted in Image, Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977),
142–48.
61. Note that this consolidating argument is precisely the one that Solkin makes—
compellingly—for the paintings.
62. Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, quoted in Solkin, Painting for Money, 219.

Siddons: Sensibility and Science 151

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