Two Boys by Candlelight, Blowing a Bladder

A single candle, hidden behind the boy’s hand, draws attention to the activity underway: children at play with a makeshift balloon, formed by blowing air into a pig’s bladder. The warm glow of the hidden flame lifts the boys’ features out of the shadows, reflects the glinting metal of the candlestick, and dramatically illuminates the bladder itself. In both treatment of light and subject matter, Joseph Wright has drawn his inspiration from seventeenth-century Dutch art, in which bladders or soap bubbles symbolized the emptiness of the material world and the fragility and brevity of life.