Portrait of Rev D'Ewes Coke, his wife Hannah and Daniel Parker Coke

This 1782 portrait of Rev D'Ewes Coke, his wife Hannah, and Daniel Parker Coke is a major group portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, one of the most original British painters of the 18th century. Wright, based in the industrial Midlands, brought the spirit of Enlightenment science and industry to his art. Joseph Wright of Derby's portraits served the prosperous industrial and professional class of the English Midlands — manufacturers, engineers, merchants, and professional men whose social ambitions required the dignity of oil portraiture while their practical identities differed markedly from the aristocratic subjects of Reynolds or Gainsborough. Wright's portraits have the quality of his genre paintings transposed to the portrait format: the subjects are observed with complete attention and rendered with technical mastery, but the social context — the emerging industrial capitalism of the Midlands, the specific world of Derby and its surrounding towns — gives his portraits their distinctive character as documents of a new social class.

The group portrait demonstrates Wright's accomplished handling of multiple figures in a domestic setting, with the candlelit illumination and careful characterization that distinguished his portraiture from London-based rivals.