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This iconic landscape depicts one of the most important scenes in British industrial history. Wright’s decision to paint Richard Arkwright’s new cotton mills at Cromford saw one of the first instances of the new age impacting on landscape painting. Contemporaries looked on the mills with awe, one writing in 1790, “These cotton mills, seven stories high, and fill’d with inhabitants, remind me of a first rate man of war; and when they are lighted up, on a dark night, look most luminously beautiful.” [John Byng, cited in Klingender p55]. For artists, the challenge was how to translate the spectacle onto canvas.
Here, Wright solves that challenge triumphantly. In this picture the powers of labour and engineering are celebrated as much as the beauty of moonlight and landscape. It is significant that Wright chose to paint the scene at night, thus conveying the frenetic activity inside, where work carried on twenty-four hours a day. Wright, already the pioneer of industrial scenes and candle-lit pictures, and himself a local who directly benefited from the growing industrial prosperity, was the first artist to convey this new aesthetic.

This picture is one of two large moonlit versions of the Mills by Wright, and was painted in the 1790s. Sadly, the first version (c.1782/3) has suffered dramatically from over-cleaning, and is in parts almost unreadable except in terms of effect and atmosphere. It was sold by Wright to the Coke family, in whose possession it remained until c.1967. The present picture can be grouped with two other related landscapes painted in the 1790s, which, in demonstrating similarities in handling, reveal that Wright further developed his technique later in his career. The two pictures are both landscapes connected to Arkwright; ‘Willersley Castle’ (Arkwright’s home at Cronford), and ‘Arkwright’s Cotton Mills’ by day [both formerly Grant coll.] We cannot be certain as to why Wright revisited the subject at this later date. In the present picture, David Fraser has pointed to the addition of two new buildings in the foreground, and a complete reworking of the rocky hillside on the right, differences which demonstrate that the later picture is not simply a replicated version. We must also note the fact that Willersley Castle was almost certainly commissioned by Jedediah Strutt, Arkwright’s business partner [the picture was sold by his descendants in 1828 at Christies, 14th May], therefore demonstrating that at least one local patron commissioned Wright to paint scenes connected to Arkwright in the later 1790s.

Recent conservation has finally allowed the status of the present picture to be fully re-established. Until now, a layer of discoloured varnish, as well as much scattered overpaint, had obscured much of the painting, and especially the subtle tones and details that are immediate signals of attribution. As a result, the attribution to Wright has been questioned over the last twenty years.

Such uncertainty, however, can now be fully resolved, not least because of the obvious stylistic hallmarks reminiscent of Wright’s other. There is here an abundance of evidence, for example, of his painstaking detail work, reflecting the ‘finishing’ that Rica Jones has noted “became almost an obsession with Wright … indeed there is one instance of a patron paying him extra to ‘finish it highly’” [Rica Jones, Paint and Purpose, London 1999, p.59]. We can again see too the variations in technique Wright used for different areas of the composition: the thick granular paint used to depict the light falling from the factory window; the sgraffito of the water; the creamy paint worked wet into wet to depict the attenuated clouds caught in the moonlight; and finally the thick pools of dark glazes used in the foliage of the foreground.

The provenance of this picture also helps affirm the attribution to Wright. According to family tradition the picture was given by the artist to Thomas Haden, the eminent Derby surgeon and friend of Wright (Haden named one of his sons Wright). The picture was then given to Haden’s daughter, Sarah, who married in 1814, James Oakes of Riddings, a member of an important local gentry family. The picture has remained in the family’s possession ever since.

David Fraser, who prior to cleaning had doubted this picture’s status as a version of the earlier work, has pointed out that since cleaning his view has now altered; “On balance my thoughts [now] tend toward Wright having painted both versions… the Oakes version later, probably in the 1790s.” [private notes, March 2006.]