Portrait of Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) c.1770

“This picture was one of two autograph versions painted by Wright, and belonged to Darwin’s brother, William. It has descended in that branch of the Darwin family until recently.”

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Erasmus Darwin possessed one of the most ingenious minds in eighteenth century England. He was, for example, a fellow of the Royal Society by the age of thirty. A physician, poet, inventor, botanist, biologist and philosopher, he significantly advanced human understanding in almost every field of human nature and science that he tackled, so much so that it is impossible to list his achievements in a single summary. As a founder member of the Lunar Society, the gathering in Birmingham of like-minded inventors and scientists, he contributed to the progress of the industrial revolution. As an early proponent of the theory of biological evolution, he left a profound influence on his grandson, Charles.

Darwin trained as a physician in Edinburgh and Cambridge, and established his first medical practice in Lichfield in 1756, where he remained until he moved to Derby in 1783. As a doctor, he earned an impressive reputation, not only developing new, on occasion seemingly miraculous, treatments, but advocating public health and the importance of sanitation. He was later asked by George III to become his personal doctor, who asked ‘Why does not Dr. Darwin come to London? He shall be my physician if he comes.’ Darwin declined the post, not least because he wished to remain in Lichfield and pursue the experiments and inventions which fascinated him. These included the construction of a talking machine, a mechanical bird, and a horizontal windmill designed for Josiah Wedgewood. This last invention was typical of Darwin’s ideas for the advancement of industrial progress, most usually expressed amongst his friends in the Lunar Society such as James Watt, whose development of the steam engine he encouraged. Not all of Darwin’s inventions were successful; he walked with a limp for much of his life, following an accident in a carriage he had developed.

It was primarily Darwin’s fascination with plants and the observation of domestic animals that spurred his theories of evolution and scientific writings. He established his own botanical garden, and in the 1770s he translated the work of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, publishing A System of Vegetables in 1783, and the Families of Plants in 1787. His most important work is probably Zoonomia (1794), in which he proposed that all life on earth developed from an initial, single, ‘living filament’, and that subsequent evolution was driven partly by competition. Darwin’s literary work itself evolved out of his belief that clarity of explanation was key to the advancement of ideas and knowledge, that one should ‘enlist the imagination under the banner of science’. His posthumously published Temple of Nature thus expounds his theory of evolution poetically;

‘Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth;
From Nature's womb the plant or insect swims,
And buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs.

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.’

Darwin was also ahead of his time on the social issues of his age. He was in favour of the broader education of women, in specially established schools with classes on chemistry and maths, rather than home schooling with improving books. Sceptical on matters of religion, he advocated religious freedom and toleration, together with, by extension, such laudable aims as the abolition of slavery and the alleviation of poverty in industrial Britain. Naturally, as a proponent in the ruling authority of knowledge, reason and progress, Darwin was a supporter of the French and American Revolutions. The ‘terror’ of the former, however, meant that, shortly after his death, Darwin’s writings became increasingly criticised, and even lampooned, as leading to the breakdown of social order and national morality. His reputation suffered for much of the early nineteenth century. His grandson, Charles, was amongst the first to rehabilitate Darwin’s record with a biography in 1878.

The present portrait was painted by Joseph Wright of Derby in about 1770, probably in Lichfield. Wright, a patient of Darwin’s, was the perfect choice to paint the likeness, for not only was he personally acquainted with many of the Lunar Society and thus Darwin’s friends, such as Sir Richard Arkwright, but he was the first artist to depict the new sciences and power of the industrial revolution, from his candle-lit Orrery [Derby Art Gallery], to Arkwrights Mill by Night. Here, he portrays Darwin with typical honesty and clarity. Darwin, although a teetotaller, believed that heavy eating contributed to health, and consequently was ‘a large man, fat, and rather clumsy’. Nonetheless, Wright captures the sitter’s formidable intellectual powers and his congeniality. Darwin's friend Anna Seward wrote of it as ‘a simple contemplative portrait, of the most perfect resemblance.’
This picture was one of two autograph versions painted by Wright, and belonged to Darwin’s brother, William. It has descended in that branch of the Darwin family until recently.