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Joseph Wright of
Derby painted An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump in 1768. In Wright’s painting, a pet cockatoo
has been removed from a cage (shown in the upper right corner) and placed in a
bell jar from which the air is evacuated. The experimenter’s hand is placed
near the stopcock, and he holds the power to halt the evacuation and return air
to the jar to revive the bird. A old man stares at a human skull, contemplating
death. A young girl covers her eyes to avoid viewing the impending horror,
while a second girl stares anxiously upward and a woman, unable to watch, gazes
at the face of another man who views the experiment directly. As Yaakov Garb
has pointed out, the men and women have different responses. The women are
stereotypically emotional, looking in horror at the bell jar, hiding their
eyes, or looking at the men, thereby experiencing the results vicariously. The
men, on the other hand, control the outcome via the stopcock, stare directly at
the experiment with open curiosity, or contemplate the larger philosophical
meaning of death. The men “witness” a scientific truth, the women “experience”
a dying bird. The painter has forced social norms about male and female
scientific responses to nature onto the audience. The experiment reflects the
goals of Francis Bacon’s method. A question is asked of nature, a controlled experiment
is devised, and the results are witnessed and evaluated for their truth content.
Whether a particular experiment reflects the torture of nature (or the mere “pestering”
of nature) must be left to the individual to decide.
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