Sir Ian Blatchford, Director of the Science Museum Group, and the Science Museum’s Head of Collections, Dr Tilly Blyth, begin their series exploring how art and science have inspired each other with Joseph Wright’s painting A Philosopher Giving A Lecture On The Orrery from 1766 and now in the permanent collection at Derby Museum. Wright’s work celebrates the relationship between astronomical science and a religious understanding of the cosmos.

It’s a fitting choice to begin this 20-part series that reveals how the ingenuity of science and technology has been incorporated into artistic expression – and how creative practice, in turn, stimulated innovation and technological change. As Ian Blatchford says; “In Wright of Derby’s painting, science makes a dramatic entry on stage. It’s a new character in the human drama. A modern scientific age is announced with all its novelty, excitement, disruption and above all, the ambiguity of its potential”.

Tilly Blyth reveals that it’s likely that Wright first encountered an orrery when Scottish astronomer James Fergusson visited Derby on a lecture tour in 1762. The orrery was designed to explain God’s creation, not replace it. Fergusson’s mechanical device is one of many types produced to demonstrate the workings of Newton’s universe. It’s a jewel within the Science Museum Group Collection and shows how key ideas about the rationality of the heavens spread far beyond those who first developed them.

Producer Adrian Washbourne

Produced in partnership with The Science Museum Group

Photograph: Christophel Fine Art/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Show less