Two Boys with a Bladder

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."