Mr and Mrs Thomas Coltman

This double portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Coltman, around 1771, in the National Gallery London, depicts a prosperous Midlands couple in a landscape setting. Wright was the leading painter of the English Midlands, portraying the industrial and professional classes who were transforming Britain through the Industrial Revolution. 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 couple is shown at ease in a landscape, the wife's white dress creating a luminous center. Wright's treatment of natural light on fabric and flesh demonstrates the outdoor painting skills that complemented his famous candlelight interiors.