What’s in a price? This episode sets out to answer that question, via Joseph Wright’s Experiment on a Bird in a Pump, the construction of the London interbank lending rate, and some ruminations on the nature of fact. As for why it matters, we visit 80’s London for a tale of greed, sausages and a salmon pink Bentley. This is the end of the first part of the podcast. Episodes will restart in September.

Transcription

There’s a picture hanging in London’s National Gallery called An Experiment on a Bird in a Pump. Painted by Joseph Wright of Derby in 1768, it’s extraordinary. It shines. I try to creep up on it, so as to take its figures by surprise. They are not bothered about me, for they are watching the experiment. Near the centre of the canvass there is a glass jar. It contains a parakeet, whose life is being brought to a premature and unpleasant end by the extraction of air from the chamber. Light spills out of the painting, catching the faces of the onlookers in movement; you can’t quite see the source for it is obscured by what appears to be a brain in a jar of liquid. Two young men watch the experiment earnestly. A young couple to the left of the painting have little interest in the wretched bird. A man, an enthusiast, wild haired, wrapped in a red dressing gown and a shirt open at the neck, is pointing to the jar and declaiming to the watching boys. His right hand hovers above the brass mechanism and winding handle of the air pump, a precision instrument of its time, set in a heavy, carved, wooden frame. Two young girls are visibly upset by the suffering. One covers her eyes with her hand, while the other clutches her sister’s gown for support. Another man comforts the girls. He is speaking and pointing to the bird. You can imagine him saying: ‘Come now, this is science. Put away your childish sorrow and take heed of our remarkable demonstration.’ Another boy, his face a mixture of malice and sorrow is shutting up the birdcage hanging from the ceiling, while, to the far right of the picture an older man rests his chin on his walking stick and stares at the apparatus with an unfocused, pensive gaze. Stepping back from the painting one can see the trappings of wealth: the rich finery of the clothes, the polished wood furniture and expensive apparatus, the heavy fresco plasterwork of a doorway in the background. The moon shines pale through a large sash window. It is a country house spectacle. These details are hidden in the half-darkness, away from the extraordinary chiaroscuro Wright achieves with the lamplight.

Compare this to another of Wright’s masterpieces, the Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone. Again, the canvas is lit by light emanating from a glass vessel and the light catches faces in movement. But the setting is utterly different. The light, much hotter and brighter than the gentle lamp of the country house, boils out of a glass vessel held on a tripod, its stem bound tightly into a metal pipe running into a peeling brickwork chimney. It illuminates a room that resembles a church with Gothic arches built with plain stone; in the background the moon shines this time through a mullioned Gothic window. A man kneels by the vessel. He is old, grey haired, with a thick long beard, dressed like a hermit. His gaze is directed at the ceiling, so that his face, illuminated from below appears in an attitude of prayer. He is surrounded by the junk of alchemy, pots, vases, scrolls and a globe. Behind him there is some kind of writing table and two surly faced boys are chatting and pointing at the kneeling man. The sole, incongruent trace of modernity is a clock shown clearly in the middle of the picture.

Wright may well have seen these paintings as reflections of the same activity, the advance of science and progress, literally illuminating and metaphorically enlightening. But his two very different visions of scientific activity not only record the birth of modern experimenta...