Joseph Wright of Derby
(1734 - 1797)
 

Joseph Wright ARA styled Joseph Wright of Derby, was an English painter who specialised in portrait painting and landscape art. He has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution".
Wright is notable for his use of tenebrism, an exaggerated form of the better known chiaroscuro effect, which emphasizes the contrast of light and dark, and for his paintings of candle-lit subjects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Wright_of_Derby

Two Boys with a Bladder
1767
Oil on canvas
111.1 × 91.8 cm
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109Q0X

 

The painting depicts two young boys, boldly lit by a concealed candle, inflating a pig's bladder. At the time, animal bladders served as toys, either inflated and tossed like balloons or filled with dried peas and shaken like rattles. In European art, bladders often functioned as symbolic variants on soap bubbles, fragile playthings signifying the brevity of human life and the transience of human achievement. Although bladders were depicted frequently in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, they were less common in eighteenth-century British art, and Wright has taken liberties with the motif. The elaborate costumes—with their frilled collars and cuffs—worn by the boys seem to be of the artist's own invention, in the style of contemporary British "fancy pictures."