Which artists will define our age?

It glows. The whole painting glows. Glows not just with the way the light from a fire unseen beyond the artist’s frame reflects in his glistening eyes; reflects in the moist redness of his almost girlish lips; reflects in the folds of his turban and silky grey sash. It glows too from an inner radiation, glows from his character.

We have in Britain some arcane tax legislation that can bring a harvest that’s anything but arcane. The recent acquisition of Joseph Wright of Derby’s ‘Self-Portrait at the Age of about Forty’ (c. 1772) has been made possible ‘in lieu of inheritance tax… under a hybrid arrangement and allocated to Derby Museums… with further support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund’. Private individuals like Robert M. Kirkland and other donors and foundations have helped too. The result is that the self-portrait of the great 18th-century artist of the Midlands industrial revolution has come home.

It has just been put on display, the centrepiece of an entire gallery room devoted by the Derby Museum and Gallery to their city’s greatest artistic son. Wright doesn’t just happen to come from Derby and didn’t just happen to live in the English Midlands when Sir Richard Arkwright revolutionised the spinning industry at Cromford Mill, 20 miles up the river Derwent. These realities and this world made him, and made his art. There are such things as soundtracks to an era; there are also artworks that frame it for us – and Joe Wright has that distinction. He brings to us the excitement of scientific and industrial progress.

I went last week to see the acquisition in its new setting. It has been beautifully done. All around the walls are Wright’s paintings: portraits, real and imaginary scenes, landscapes, families with wondering children caught by his brush as they gaze at scientific experiments, blacksmiths at their anvil.