Arkwright's Mills

This 1795 painting of Arkwright's Mills is one of the most important industrial subjects in British art, depicting the cotton mills at Cromford that initiated the factory system. Wright, as the painter closest to the Industrial Revolution, documented these epoch-making structures with artistic seriousness. 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 painting combines topographic accuracy with atmospheric landscape painting, presenting the industrial buildings within their river valley setting under dramatic lighting conditions that invest the scene with sublime grandeur.