Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), though conventionally known as a 'painter of light', returned repeatedly to nocturnal images. His essential preoccupations were dark and melancholy, and he had an enduring concern with death, ruin, old age, loss of...

This illuminating and original book opens up a neglected corner of eighteenth-century art – the funeral monument. In the last forty years, studies of the satires of early and mid-eighteenth-century England have multiplied, whereas its funerary monume...