Joseph Wright of Derby - Painter of the Industrial Revolution

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the towns of Derby, Lichfield, Stoke and Birmingham became the dispersed centres of an important provincial cultural and intellectual revival, which discarded the self-regarding Augustan values of the metropolis in favour of an empirical and sceptical attitude of serious enquiry, and was paralleled by similar movements in Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Drawing inspiration and energy from the gradual industrial development and consequent increased economic importance of the Midland and Northern cities, these revivals found expression in the founding of a succession of Literary and Philosophical Societies and subscription libraries, whose interests were both practical and speculative, aiming towards the betterment of society through the application of recent scientific discoveries to industrial processes, agriculture and transportation. This was a new kind of provincial culture, autonomous and independent, redefining itself through serious debate and enquiry, and consciously opposed to metropolitan values and procedures.