So, what is with Joseph Wright of Derby? A man whose painterly technique was so extraordinary but who produced works devoid of content, empty.

Wright painted the surface. He painted the surface with other-worldly skill but he never captured the other-worldly soul. Art, especially music, but painting too, has a direct path to our feelings. It can bypass the intellect and just get us right there. Van Gogh did that. In everything Vincent painted he captured the soul. Even his room at Arles. We saw into the soul of inanimate objects, of landscapes, into his own great, good, troubled soul, into the souls of the other people he painted, and he made us feel. He went far beneath the surface. Wright of Derby did not make us feel, he did not go beneath the surface, and the surfaces he mirrored so exquisitely were empty, eccentric, comic, parody-ish. There is no there there.