Wright found this particular mouse floating in a bucket of water one January morning in his Mother’s back garden. Dentures feature in several paintings by Wright and represent for him, an absence of a loved one “they are the thing that one receives in a little plastic bag, along with a watch, rings, phone numbers and other such personal effects when an elderly relative has died. The teeth being prosthetic, are the part that remains when a body decays. The fact of their removal is in itself, rather an odd concept, as though we would like to remember someone by the part of them that was not organic. There is something rather queesey about dentures, particularly those removed from a corpse’s skull. Because of their associations, dentures function for me as a momento mori; a reminder of one’s ultimate mortality.” Wright considered putting a set of dentures into his painting Gallus gallus with still life and Presidents as a specific reference to Isaiah Berlin.