In eighteenth-century England, large numbers of women, of all ages, could be found working in a plethora of trades. Printmaking was one of them. In London, women undertook diverse forms of paid labour; some were members of the City’s Livery Companies, and a significant number of them ran businesses.Footnote ¹ They worked as candlemakers, clockmakers, fanmakers, silversmiths, and milliners – to name just a few of their roles – and surviving trade cards and bill heads testify to their presence in a broad range of trades and professions, including those not typically considered ‘feminine’.Footnote ² Historians of women’s work have considerably altered our understanding of the roles women played in eighteenth-century London, demonstrating that they were clearly an essential part of the fabric of economic life in the English capital.Footnote ³

Countless women belonged to larger trade families and were expected to be part of the family enterprise, as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall outlined in their influential book, Family Fortunes (1987).Footnote ⁴ Within the printmaking trade, the majority of women who made impressions likewise did so within the structure of the family workshop. As it was typical for families ‘in trade’ to live and work in the same building, it was in the traditional setting of their own homes that several women printmakers were taught how to make prints. In statistical terms, there were approximately forty women who lived, worked, and made prints in these circumstances from c. 1750–c. 1850.Footnote ⁵

This chapter is a broad account of the experiences of the printmaker’s family home-cum-workshop in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, focusing on the role and status of women within these families and spaces. Though the period in question was once thought to be one in which the spaces of ‘home’ and ‘work’ grew increasingly separate, historians such as Hannah Barker and Jane Hamlett have shown that in small family businesses, the domestic and commercial continued to coexist under one roof.Footnote ⁶ Weaving key examples throughout, this chapter will ask: What did women do, and not do, in the printmaker’s workshop? What forms of instruction were available to those women who were born into a printmaking family and were these opportunities comparable with the training offered to male relatives, such as their brothers? The case of Letitia Byrne (1779–1849), daughter of the engraver, William Byrne (1743–1805), will be considered alongside that of Ann (1782–1866) and Jane (1783–1824) Taylor, daughters of the engraver, Isaac Taylor (1759–1829). Isaac Taylor and William Byrne were two of those British printmakers who had witnessed and participated in London’s transition from a market of continental imports and artistic obscurity in the early half of the eighteenth century, to its dominance of the international print market in the latter half.Footnote ⁷ Crucially, both Isaac and William made the decision to train all their offspring – including their daughters – in their profession. Finally, the example of Elizabeth Cristall (1771–1853), an aspiring printmaker who was not born into the trade, will reveal that training within the family workshop was almost the only way for a young woman to enter the profession.

William Byrne, who lived ‘in the bosom of a numerous and worthy family’ at 79 Titchfield Street in Marylebone, was a distinguished engraver and print publisher, particularly of topographical single-sheet prints and book illustrations.Footnote ⁸ Around 1774, he married his first wife, Ann of Taunton (dates unknown), and the couple had five children: Anne Frances (b. 1775), Mary (b. 1776), Letitia (b. 1779), Elizabeth (b. 1784), and John (b. 1786).Footnote ⁹ Less than two miles from Titchfield Street, at 54 Red Lyon Street in Holborn, the engraver, Isaac Taylor, and his wife, Ann Martin (1757–1830), lived with their two daughters, Ann (b. 1782) and Jane (b. 1783). In 1784, rising rental costs and ongoing health issues drove the Taylor family to Suffolk, sixty miles from London, where they welcomed three sons: Isaac (b. 1787), Martin (b. 1788), and Jefferys (b. 1792). In her Autobiography, the eldest daughter, Ann, describes the exact moment when she began to learn her father’s trade: ‘It had been on the 12th of July 1797, when I was in my sixteenth year, that the design always kept in view of educating Jane and me to engraving as a profession, was first put into practice.’Footnote ¹⁰

It may seem unsurprising that many women printmakers were trained by a father or relative. Indeed, it has been taken as a given in art historical scholarship that early modern women artists ‘received their training in the arts as a result of being related to male artists’.Footnote ¹¹ However, as Martin Myrone has recently argued, these observations ‘have been allowed to remain as generalities’.Footnote ¹² Both print scholars and feminist art historians have been largely ignorant of the gendered mechanisms of the eighteenth-century family workshop environment and of the role of women within these overlapping commercial and domestic spaces.Footnote ¹³ This chapter will therefore highlight the centrality of the family workshop in framing and encouraging women’s printed productions, exploring the opportunities – and challenges – that being born into a trading family presented.

Apprenticeship

Apprenticeship was the formal training system implemented by many professions and trades across Europe in the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ A premium was paid for an apprentice to be bound to a master, usually around the age of thirteen.Footnote ¹⁵ Typically, the student would board and work with that master and would be instructed in their specialist line of work.Footnote ¹⁶ In London, girls had been apprenticed since at least the fourteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet Amy Louise Erickson’s recent research on eighteenth-century female apprentices in the London Livery Companies concluded that, on average, their numbers formed only one per cent of apprentices registered by guilds, and only five per cent of apprentices paying premiums.Footnote ¹⁸

As most printmakers operated beyond the jurisdiction of the City of London, apprenticeship in the printmaking trade was not a necessity, but could be undertaken to bolster connections within the book trade.Footnote ¹⁹ Timothy Clayton states that the standard fee for an engraver’s premium was around £50 in England in 1740, rising to around £100 by 1775, though this depended on the skill and reputation of the master.Footnote ²⁰ Unfortunately, as Erikson has noted, there is no proper study of apprenticeship premiums in the eighteenth century, and so it is hard to make comparisons with other trades.Footnote ²¹

Print scholar David Alexander, whose pioneering research on women printmakers has been central to my research, previously noted only two cases where young women were formally apprenticed to an engraver in this period.Footnote ²² These were Caroline Kirkley (c. 1775–1823), the daughter of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s servant, Ralph Kirkley, and Ann Probin (c. 1773–c. 1819), daughter of the gunmaker, John Probin.Footnote ²³ Both Kirkley and Probin were apprenticed to John Raphael Smith on 1 April 1789, for five years, for a £50 premium each.Footnote ²⁴ By 1789, both young women were advanced in age for apprentices: Caroline was around nineteen years old, while Ann was around twenty-one. Though the typical printmaking apprenticeship was seven years, it was not uncommon for there to be exceptions to this rule and, as Erickson has revealed, female apprentices were more typically bound for a shorter period than their male counterparts. The £50 fee was hardly a substantial sum but it might be that Kirkley and Probin did not live with Smith, and that this was reflected in the cost of the indenture.Footnote ²⁵

It is very possible that Probin and Kirkley were apprenticed to Smith because his wife and daughters also lived in the family workshop.Footnote ²⁶ (Smith’s daughters, Emma and Eliza, also made mezzotints. Emma, in particular, made a number of technically sophisticated mezzotints in the early nineteenth century, which were highly praised in the contemporary press.Footnote ²⁷) Having a group of women present in the household may well have appealed to Probin and Kirkley’s families, concerned, for the sake of propriety, about their daughters training in a male-dominated trade. It is likely to have been for this reason that, in September 1806, the bookseller, William Hayley (1745–1820), approached the engraver, Caroline Watson (1760/1–1814), to take on a young woman, ‘Little Fanny’, as an apprentice.Footnote ²⁸ Watson, however, declined, stating:

Furthermore, it appears that Hayley suggested that Little Fanny could undertake the duties of both apprentice and servant, which Watson firmly protested: ‘I think you will see that the two characters of pupil and servant cannot be united in the same person. The steady attention which drawing and engrave [sic] require must not be interrupted by domestick business.’Footnote ³⁰ It is notable that Hayley had suggested to Watson that Little Fanny could undertake domestic responsibilities alongside her professional training; had the apprentice been a young man, it is highly unlikely that he would have made the same proposal.

This lack of female apprentices in the printmaking trade reinforces the conclusions drawn by Erikson, who summarised that ‘apprenticeship registers record tiny numbers of girls receiving training’.Footnote ³¹ Yet, even set against such figures, which show girls were apprenticed to the London trades in a significantly smaller number than men, there seems to have been a disproportionately tiny number of young women apprenticed in the English printmaking trade.

The Family Workshop: ‘fitting us for self-support’

Rather than undertaking formal apprenticeships, many women printmakers who were born into printmaking families were expected to contribute to the family enterprise. As Priscilla Wakefield argued in her Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex (1798): ‘The knowledge of a trade is a probable means which ought not to be neglected, of enabling them to give their assistance towards the support of their family.’Footnote ³² Printmakers, like many other trades and professional peoples, often trained their offspring so that they could support the family and the household’s economy. In utilising the labour of their children, family funds were saved from being spent bringing in additional help.

Parents also taught their children so that, after their own retirement or death, their offspring had the skills to be self-supporting, or at least to be able to gain meaningful employment. These skills could be utilised in marriage to form an economic partnership, but they could also be used for independent means should the individual decide not to marry, or indeed, be unable to afford to marry. For engravers such as William Byrne, the assistance of his five children in the workshop was crucial, particularly after he needed more income to weather the collapse of the print market in the 1790s, caused by the revolutionary wars with France. Significantly, his training would also allow his daughters to earn an independent living after his death, if they remained unmarried. Indeed, he may well have feared being unable to find dowries for his four daughters. William likely shared the same sentiments as the painter, Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), who wrote in a letter to a friend in 1764 that he would teach his daughters ‘to paint Landscape; and that somewhat above the common Fan-Mount stile [sic] … that they may do something for their bread’.Footnote ³³

Most unusually, Ann and Jane Taylor were given an independent income for their labour in their father’s workshop. This began in their teenage years, as Ann recalls:

To be sure, Isaac Taylor clearly cherished his family, yet paying his daughters for their labour may also have been a subtle way of instilling in them the importance of maintaining an independent income should they not marry.

Instruction, Collaborations, and Networks

The instruction offered to women in the family print workshop was likely to be enormously varied, changing according to shifting domestic concerns, socioeconomic circumstances and the size of the family at any particular time. The art of making an intaglio print – the family of techniques in which an image is made by incising into a printing plate – was, of course, the most important skill that could be taught to a prospective engraver. In the workshop, from a young age, perhaps even as young as seven, both apprentices and offspring would receive face-to-face training, covering all aspects of intaglio printmaking. Typically, this would have encompassed verbal instruction and correction, but also hands-on tuition, providing crucial opportunities to observe and imitate the day-to-day work involved in making a print. Tasks were numerous and varied, and would develop in complexity over the course of the apprenticeship. The pupil would begin by performing jobs such as tidying the workshop and learning where all the necessary tools were housed. They would then progress to preparing the copper sheets – trimming, polishing, and arranging them – as well as ‘grinding the ink’ and preparing the resulting waxy, acid-resistant ground necessary for the etching method.Footnote ³⁵

Though much of what can be said is speculative, contemporary advice literature aimed at the parents of prospective apprentices does provide us with some key information about the skills required of the printmaker’s apprentice. ‘A Genius for Drawing’, as Robert Campbell notes in The London Tradesman (1747), was crucial, as was an acquaintance ‘with Painting … a nice Judgement in the Works of the most famous Artists, and perfectly Masters of the Doctrines of Light and Shade, in which their art consists’.Footnote ³⁶ According to Campbell, the education offered to the apprentice ‘ought to be pretty liberal’, though the hopeful student should already be possessed of a few informal qualifications and skills:

Campbell’s account would have made attractive reading for any parent who wished to enrol their son into the printmaker’s trade: his account refers only to ‘man’ or ‘men’; likewise he frequently uses the pronoun ‘he’.Footnote ³⁸ He does include a discussion of female traders and apprentices elsewhere in his guide, in his chapters ‘the Milliner’, ‘the Comb-Maker’, ‘Cap-Maker’, ‘Stay-Maker’, and the ‘Mantua-Maker’. This indicates that it was those trades that were primarily open to female apprentices. Indeed, Erickson’s work on milliner apprentices confirms that this was the case; ‘Clothing trades accounted for sixty per cent of all the masters and mistresses taking female apprentices.’Footnote ³⁹

Surviving impressions, such as Letitia Byrne’s Animals Etched by Letitia Byrne from the Most Esteem’d Masters, also give us visual clues as to the training undertaken by some printmakers. In 1795, aged only fourteen or fifteen years old, Letitia made a set of thirteen etchings after prints by a variety of seventeenth-century Dutch artists, revealing that her father had given her access to significant, imported continental prints by some of Europe’s most accomplished and celebrated landscape and animal painters. Published by Darling and Thompson on 1 January 1795, the frontispiece of this series (Figure 5.1) is a confident interpretation of a work by the pioneering animal painter Paulus Potter (1625–1654), etched after his death by his fellow countryman, Marcus de Bye, in 1664.Footnote ⁴⁰ Like de Bye, Letitia purposely and clearly asserted her authorship – and her link to her family trade – by etching her name onto the rock in the foreground of the print. Her careful translation reveals how, at a young age, she had managed successfully to acquaint herself with the tonality and marks of de Bye’s etching. She made some subtle changes to the composition, for example adding horizontal shading on the stone and removing it in the sky, but the etching corresponds very closely, even in size, to the Dutch print.

Figure 5.1 Letitia Byrne, after Paulus Potter and Marcus de Bye, Frontispiece to Animals Etched by Letitia Byrne From the Most Esteem’d Masters, Published by Darling and Thompson, London, 1795.

Etching, 14.5 × 18 cm. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Letitia was the only one of the Byrne children who created impressions for the London market at such a young age, indicating that her skill with the etching needle was notable within her large, artistic family. Detailed in their execution, these prints indicate her solid technical grounding and the quality of the material available to her. William Byrne’s use of prints by the Dutch masters in his training process was not uncommon. In the studio of the reproductive engraver, copying the prints of previous masters was an important exercise, and had been since the sixteenth century. Yet, along with teaching them to etch by copying the prints of older, famed Masters, William also took his children’s training beyond the studio, so that they could practise their draughtsmanship. In his famous diary, the artist Joseph Farington (1747–1821), a close friend of the family, detailed: ‘Byrne goes to Windsor tomorrow for a few days with his family to afford them an opportunity of drawing from trees in the Park.’Footnote ⁴¹ Sketching en plein air does not appear to have been standard practice in Britain for those training to be engravers, and probably highlights William’s particular determination to give his children a thorough artistic education. It also demonstrates the benefits of being born into a printmaking family: it is highly unlikely that William Byrne’s apprentices also benefited from this development opportunity.

Another one of Letitia’s early forays into etching plates for the European print market was for large, topographical publications, collaborating on impressions with her father. Donnington Castle, made for the ambitious publication, Britannia Depicta, and also published in January 1805 as a single sheet print, is co-signed by Letitia and her father: ‘Engraved by W. & L. Byrne’. Made after a drawing by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) who provided William with watercolours to translate into engravings, the image depicts the gatehouse to the ruined fourteenth-century castle, overlooking the Lambourne Valley.Footnote ⁴² Letitia and her father have faithfully interpreted Turner’s charming early watercolour in the more complex and laborious processes of etching and engraving; most of the plate was etched, but engraving was added to strengthen parts of the composition. It is difficult to ascertain which parts of the print Letitia put her hand to, and which parts William created. Yet, given William’s experience with the burin, it is possible that Letitia made the initial etching of the castle, the landscape, and the human figures, with William finishing the plate by engraving the sky. Letitia had already demonstrated her skill in making prints of animals in their natural habitats, so it is possible that she etched these as well as some of the finer details in the foreground of the image. As we can see in the publication line, William published the jointly signed print from their home-cum-workshop at 79 Titchfield Street. In doing so, Letitia’s name and her familial association with the trade was advertised to the market for high quality, topographical prints and illustrated books.

Though familial relationships were crucial, wider associations of friendship and patronage were also of paramount importance within the printmaking trade, and the artistic network that a printmaker built during years training in the workshop would prove essential over their career. Letitia and her siblings benefited from the convivial environment provided by her father in their home-cum-workshop, where it is certain they would have been introduced to a host of the key players in British art. In his diary, Farington details the numerous dinners that took place at the Byrne home. Often, he draws the layout of the seating plan, which makes it clear that all William’s artistic children were present at these events, partaking in the networking that was so crucial to commercial success. Joseph Farington became a very important supporter and promoter of the work of Letitia and Elizabeth Byrne, in particular, loaning them his landscape drawings to copy, and offering them his advice on the quality of their productions, particularly those pieces that they hoped to submit to London’s public exhibitions. ‘Byrne I drank tea at’, Farington wrote in August, 1801, ‘I went to make some remarks to his youngest daughter on her drawings.’Footnote ⁴³

Similarly, Ann Taylor records her father taking her to London, when she was eighteen years old, with the specific intent of introducing her ‘to several artists of note’. She recalls meeting William Byrne and his daughters:

That Isaac Taylor sought out William Byrne suggests that he was specifically keen for his daughter to meet other young women who were likewise being trained in the profession. This points to the gendered networking that clearly took place between such women, creating friendships that could be vital in male-dominated artistic communities.

‘Supra’ and ‘Infra’

Though boys and girls had much the same training in the printmaking workshop, there were some key differences in their experiences. Women’s labour within the home was of course not limited to ‘work’ that generated an income; the chief female duty in all classes in the period was believed to be those of a responsible family member, fulfilling duties bestowed by God. A woman should, it was averred, be respectful of the family hierarchy and dependent on the men within it. As the Reverend James Fordyce, in his hugely popular Sermons for Young Women (1766), reminded his readers, it was ‘those family duties for which the sex are chiefly intended’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Fordyce’s view is representative of the pervasive, normative ideals that were firmly established in eighteenth-century Britain concerning women, femininity, and the associated domestic, familial responsibilities. These ideals were circulated in contemporary literature, from sermons like Fordyce’s (continuously reissued throughout the eighteenth century) to monthly periodicals.

Furthermore, as the home and workplace of the printmaker so often coexisted throughout this period, these familial responsibilities often took place within the same spaces as professional ones. The work done by women for the business could therefore be undertaken flexibly alongside their domestic roles. Though, as seen, Caroline Watson argued that learning the art of engraving ‘must not be interrupted by domestick business’,Footnote ⁴⁶ Ann Taylor recollects that she and Jane were engaged in a carousel of labour, whereby one daughter would assist the mother with her household chores whilst the other assisted the father with his printmaking:

Ann’s account indicates that only she and Jane undertook these household duties; their brothers were not required to contribute in this regard. The training of women printmakers within the family home, then, may not have always been as systematic as that of their male siblings. Yet, Ann also notes that she and Jane could both be ‘withdrawn’ from family duties if her father gained more work that would require their assistance:

Women who worked alongside their male relatives in the family workshop were not challenging idealised domestic codes, nor were they acting beyond the boundaries of acceptable feminine behaviour. They were still concerned with feminine respectability, and their labour – both domestic and in the workshop – conformed to the ideal of a good wife or daughter, alleviating some of the pressures placed on the paterfamilias, and thus performing her necessary duties for the family.

Struggling ‘with want and means of connection’

The example of Elizabeth Cristall, a young woman who was not born into a printmaking family, demonstrates the importance of that unit for providing training and creating artistic and economic opportunities for young women. Around 1792, Elizabeth moved into shared lodgings with her older brother, Joshua Cristall (c. 1767–1847), at 28 Surrey Street, Blackfriars Road.Footnote ⁴⁹ Joshua and Elizabeth were two of four children of the mariner, Captain Alexander Cristall, and his second wife, Elizabeth Batten, and the family had settled at Rotherhithe, where Alexander had set up his own yard ‘making masts, blocks and sails’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Though the elder brother was trained in this family trade, his siblings had artistic aspirations.Footnote ⁵¹ The art historian, John Lewis Roget, writing in the late nineteenth century, informs us that they ‘had to struggle, not only with want and means of connection, but against the opposition of parents and friends’.Footnote ⁵² After serving an apprenticeship with William Hewson, who sold china and glass, Joshua intended to set up a printmaking partnership with his sister, Elizabeth, but they were firmly discouraged by the engraver, Thomas Holloway (1748–1827):

When Thomas Holloway informed Elizabeth that ‘she could not be taken as an apprentice’, he was speaking from his experience as a highly successful engraver, working at the heart of the London trade. Despite this, however, Elizabeth did try her hand at printmaking. One aquatint print by her survives, though is not clear how she learnt this technique.Footnote ⁵⁴ Brother and sister worked together on the impression: Joshua provided his sister with a drawn portrait of their friend, George Dyer (1755–1841), and it is probable that this was an attempt by the siblings to break onto the London market. Dyer, an author and advocate of political reform, must have agreed to Joshua drawing his portrait, Elizabeth etching it, and the brother publishing it on 1 May 1795.

Elizabeth Cristall’s print of George Dyer is the only work known by her. The resulting impression demonstrates a capable and promising talent for such a young and inexperienced hand. Yet the lack of training opportunities open to her, because of her sex and lack of family connection to the trade, appear to have effectively ended her printmaking career. It has been recently suggested that she went on to live with her elder sister, Ann Cristall, and became a tutor, possibly at Lewisham Grammar School.Footnote ⁵⁵ Joshua, on the other hand, went on to train as a student engraver at the Royal Academy and became a founding Member of the Old Watercolour Society, going on to become its President.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is only through records of his distinguished artistic career that we gain any insight into the aspirations of his sister.

Conclusions: Print and Prejudice?

The printmaking family was critical to the life and subsequent output of the professional woman printmaker. Indeed, having a close (usually male) relative in the trade was really the only way that a woman in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England could learn this specialist art and earn a living from it. Such was the importance of the family workshop that Elizabeth Cristall, as we have seen, was discouraged from working as an engraver because she could not be taken on as an apprentice, nor did she live ‘with a father or relative who could instruct her’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Aside from the notable exceptions of Caroline Kirkley and Ann Probin, girls were not taken on as official apprentices within the English printmaking trade.

The printmaker’s home-cum-workshop was a highly gendered space, though scholars have largely failed to recognise it as such. As Ann Taylor recollected, girls were likely to have to manage their time training in the workshop alongside their domestic responsibilities. In the Taylor’s home-cum-workshop, these household labours – which included cooking, washing, and needlework – were entirely female duties. Ann and Jane’s three brothers, meanwhile, would have benefited from their father’s continuous systematic and rigorous tutelage. Nevertheless, as exemplified by the Byrne family workshop, the instruction offered to sons and daughters on the whole could be comparable. Boys and girls were both highly trained in printmaking, giving them the core skills and vital artistic networks through which they could assist the family unit and earn a living in the future. If born into a supportive family workshop, female printmakers like Letitia Byrne were able to capitalise on their familial connection to the trade. They could take the opportunity to collaborate with more established relatives and go on to achieve significant artistic and commercial success in a challenging urban print market.

This chapter compares the life narratives and artistic practices of two sets of sister-printmakers working and living in eighteenth-century Paris: the Horthemels sisters and the Hémery sisters.Footnote ¹ Despite their relative obscurity within contemporary scholarship compared with the illustrious women of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, these six women were, according to their Parisian contemporaries, some of the most well-respected graveuses en taille-douce: female intaglio engravers who produced printed images for circulation within the commercial art market. From supporting the enterprises of their husbands or sons to reaching beyond the familial atelier to pursue careers of their own, these sisters put to rest long-standing myths that female engravers were anonymous artisans who never claimed artistic authority over their work and/or were limited to finishing the plates of male family members. To explore their lives is to contribute to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the eighteenth-century Parisian print workshop and prominent printmaking families, many of whom would have struggled without the support and labour of mothers, wives, and daughters.

The call for in-depth studies of women’s involvement in the world of eighteenth-century French printmaking has rung for decades; and yet, a lack of systemic research involving women and issues of gender within the study of European printmaking more generally persists.Footnote ² The historic lack of interest in women artists and hierarchical division between what is considered fine art and craft are partially to blame, of course; but another culprit lies in the belief that women working outside of state-sponsored art academies – including engravers – were almost always anonymous artisans. This is perhaps truer when applied to earlier centuries; and indeed, past scholarship involving sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European print workshops has argued that women who signed their work and were relatively well known within their communities were the exception rather than the rule.Footnote ³ And yet, new archival research suggests there were many professional female engravers who emerged at the turn of the eighteenth century, particularly in France.Footnote ⁴

Lia Markey hypothesised in 2005 that the changing artistic milieu of the Age of Enlightenment – including the rise of the idea of individual genius within and outside the print workshop – likely afforded new opportunities to female printmakers.Footnote ⁵ An increasing number of women began to claim artistic authorship (i.e., were credited as producers of plates), work with publishers outside of the family workshop, and even establish independent careers of their own. Indeed, in early modern France, notions of ‘Genius’ impacted emerging legal freedoms for intaglio engravers, demonstrated by a decree released by King Louis XIV and his Conseil d’État on 26 May 1660. The so-called Edict of Saint Jean-de-Luz was a response to a proposal to establish a professional body of 200 master engravers in the city of Paris, which the King rejected on the basis that intaglio engraving was a ‘liberal art’, not a trade or manufacture, that should be unfettered by guild rule. Intaglio engraving, the edict stated, ‘depends on the imagination of its authors and cannot be subjected to any other laws than those of their genius’.Footnote ⁶ Though it was challenging for intaglio engravers to overcome the association to the mechanical arts (a debate that continued throughout the eighteenth century),Footnote ⁷ the Edict of Saint-Jean-de-Luz legally confirmed there would be no official regulations in terms of apprenticeship or practice, and anyone could learn engraving or call themselves an engraver provided they had the means to do so. Though the decree did not mention graveuses specifically, it served as the catalyst for the sharp increase of professional engravers, both men and women, throughout the Ancien Régime.

The Edict of Saint-Jean-de-Luz made intaglio engraving a more accessible career path for graveuses during this period; but the reality of the printmaking workshop was that its success was not based on the individual genius of a single worker. Intaglio printmaking workshops were a familial and community workspace that required the use of many hands – including those belonging to mothers, wives, and daughters – who were involved in the design, engraving, and printing of a plate, as well as the publication and sale of a print.Footnote ⁸ This chapter employs two case studies – those of the Horthemels sisters and the Hémery sisters – to argue that the legitimacy of graveuses’ work and the success of their careers were primarily based on a series of personal and professional networks, that is, the large kinship networks that extended and descended from their birth families and marriages as well as the professional networks within their respective communities of artists, engravers, printers, and booksellers. Female intaglio engravers such as the Horthemels and Hémery sisters navigated these networks to learn engraving as a practical skill to ensure their futures, help support their families, and claim artistic authority even outside of the familial atelier.

How to Train a Graveuse

Past scholarship has highlighted the importance of the Edict of Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the regulation and freedoms of intaglio printmakers more generally,Footnote ⁹ yet very few scholars have questioned how the edict might have affected the female members of printmaking workshops.Footnote ¹⁰ With no official requirements for apprenticeship in order to call oneself a printmaker – such as a contract signed with a master engraver, though this practice did exist, or the submission of a masterwork – both men and women were free to seek training among the family members and artistic community available to them.Footnote ¹¹ This would greatly impact the women belonging to family workshops or those who lived within printmaking communities, as they could embark on a career as a professional engraver without the official training that was largely unavailable to them due to their gender, such as apprenticeships with master engravers or classes at the guild and Académie schools.Footnote ¹²

Knowledge of the fine arts was deemed essential for a well-rounded educated person of social status, but for those of the middle and lower classes, training in the art of engraving was more a financial investment. This was particularly true for the Horthemels sisters, daughters of a Netherlandish printer-bookseller, Daniel Horthemels. Their father’s premature death in 1691 placed the family – including the widow, Marie-Anne Cellier, and her six young children – in a dire financial situation. An inventory upon Daniel’s death describes a large stock and bookstore worth more than 55,000 books with two shops in the neighbourhood, for which Cellier was now responsible.Footnote ¹³ The family was forced to downsize to pay off debts incurred by outstanding projects and rent; thus, the shop’s proceeds could no longer support three unskilled daughters, and dowries were almost certainly out of the question.

The early education of the Horthemels daughters in the art of engraving was most likely an attempt to endow them with a practical skill and, eventually, secure their marriages.Footnote ¹⁴ The yet-unmarried Horthemels sisters could not become printer-booksellers like their mother – a profession regulated by a guild where the only women legally allowed to practise were widows of masters.Footnote ¹⁵ It would be Daniel le jeune and Denis Horthemels who would follow the profession of their parents, while their three sisters and another brother, Frédéric, explored other avenues to make a living. Learning the skill of engraving was accessible due to the aforementioned freedoms in regulation as well as the Horthemels’s family geographic location. Their shop, operating under the sign, au Mécénas, was located on the rue Saint-Jacques, the bookstore and engraving district of Paris. There are no extant apprenticeship contracts for any of the Horthemels sisters (very few exist for female engravers in general);Footnote ¹⁶ but, having spent their childhood and adolescence in this quartier, they must have known an engraver within their community willing to take them under their wing. Perhaps even one of the sisters’ future husbands, engravers Charles-Nicolas Cochin le père or Nicolas-Henri Tardieu, had a hand in their education. We do know that training to become a burin engraver could take several years – up to seven – and each of the Horthemels sisters was proficient in this technique.Footnote ¹⁷

Though an indicator of more freedoms of practice, the lack of recorded apprenticeship contracts between female engravers and their tutors makes it difficult to know exactly the circumstances of their training. When combined with confusing or scattered archival material involving an engraver’s birth family – as is the case for the Hémery sisters – we unfortunately can conclude very little about the life of a woman engraver before she began to produce work or her marriage. The early education of the Hémery siblings remains more elusive than that of the Horthemels for these reasons, compounded by their lesser-known husbands who have not often been the subject of art historical scholarship.Footnote ¹⁸ Based on what archival records do exist, we know that the Hémery siblings had concrete ties to the rue Saint-Jacques and one of its parishes, the Saint-Benoît neighbourhood. They likely knew other artists, engravers, and/or booksellers and printers living and working within their community from whom they could have received their training.Footnote ¹⁹

The Hémery sisters were born over a generation after the Horthemels, in the mid-eighteenth century, when diverse techniques in printmaking were beginning to be adopted and developed in France. Etching had become more in vogue in the latter half of the eighteenth century with the prominence of the amateur: elite members of society who produced prints for intellectual and social reasons rather than economic.Footnote ²⁰ Trained professionals of the lower classes also adopted the technique due to the ease with which it could be learned and practised. In contrast to burin engraving, which required considerable training and technical skill, etchers employed a simple metal stylus to ‘draw’ rather than carve onto a metal plate. Anyone with training in design could attempt an etching (and drawing in general was considered a suitable practice for young women); however, the process of placing the plate in an acid bath to bite the incised design at various lengths of time took careful planning, tools, and experience. Thus, multiple hands were typically involved in the production of an etched plate. Marguerite Hémery was particularly adept at etching small-scale book illustrations, such as those for Claude-Joseph Dorat’s Fables Nouvelles (1773) or the Almanach iconologique of Cochin le jeune (1778–1781), though it is unknown how much say, if any, she had over the production of the final image. Nevertheless, such minute, detailed work required immense concentration and dexterity of hand. Clear communication was also required between the original designer, the etcher, and the printer to pull an image with the highest clarification despite its small size. That she was employed alongside other, well-known male engravers for various projects – such as Jacques Aliamet, Étienne Fessard, and her brother-in-law, Charles-Louis Lingée – is a testament to her skill as well as to the calibre of the circle of artists to which she belonged.

Though also trained in the art of etching, Thérèse-Éléonore and Louise-Rosalie Hémery primarily engaged in crayon-manner. Unlike engraving or etching, crayon-manner did not require the printmaker to incise the plate. Instead, they used engraving tools to apply stipple patterns to a prepared ground. The technique became popular through the reproduction of works by Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It was particularly employed as a method to reproduce crayon and chalk drawings for art students’ study. Both Thérèse-Éléonore and Louise-Rosalie produced crayon-manner prints after studies of heads by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, for example, capturing the appearance of the swift strokes and deftly shaded areas produced by the original artist’s hand for close study by students and connoisseurs alike. Thérèse-Éléonore in particular practised a variety of printmaking techniques – from crayon-manner to aquatint to mezzotint – suggesting an artist with an interest in technical innovation and access to a wide variety of tutors.

Pride and Printmaking: A Woman’s Place within the Workshop

It has been argued that, when it came to the seventeenth-century female engraver at least, we cannot conclude that women found substantially more freedom within the culture of printmaking than in other artistic environments after marriage.Footnote ²¹ Lia Markey once cited German printmaker Susanna Maria von Sandrart – trained in the art of engraving by her father but forced to resign after her marriage due to the ‘heavy demands of housekeeping’ – as one example of the obstacles female engravers faced due to their gender.Footnote ²² The Horthemels and Hémery sisters represent a contrasting group of female intaglio engravers who managed to continue their work after marriage, largely because they married into other artistic families. Engraving seems to have been a kind of ‘practical dowry’ for many women who grew up on or near the rue Saint-Jacques – one that could open the door to further artistic practice.Footnote ²³ Through her marriage to painter Alexis-Simon Belle, for example, Marie-Nicole Horthemels was able to convert from engraving to painting, a skill she then bequeathed to her son, Clément-Louis-Marie-Anne Belle.

Though the Horthemels sisters’ monetary dowries were affected by the premature death of their father and the subsequent downsizing of the family shop, the practical skill of engraving and knowledge of the printmaking business brought a different kind of value to their marriages.Footnote ²⁴ By marrying a graveuse, their husbands enjoyed free promotion through their wife’s prints, which often featured the address of their husband’s home, workshop, or storefront as the location of sale. Their marriages did not mean, however, that the Horthemels sisters were now limited to reproducing the designs of their spouses; in reality, each sister created very few prints based on her husband’s works (or that of their brothers-in-law). Belle was the most frequently reproduced artist of the three, likely because he was a painter rather than an engraver. In contrast, there is only one known engraving by the Horthemels sisters produced after a design by Tardieu (the Portrait de Jean Soanen), and the work was published via the Horthemels’s family workshop rather than Tardieu’s.Footnote ²⁵ There is no record of any print after a design by Cochin le père by any of the Horthemels sisters.

Although she never reproduced the work of her husband, Louise-Madeleine Horthemels, femme Cochin did reproduce her son’s designs (as did many others). Cochin le jeune had a prolific career as a draughtsman, first for the Menus Plaisirs and then for the Académie royale upon his acceptance in 1751. His mother began reproducing his designs in print as early as 1736 when Cochin le jeune was twenty-one and Louise-Madeleine was fifty, and the two continued to collaborate well into the 1740s and 1750s. But this was by no means the bulk of Louise-Madeleine’s artistic production. Despite the Grolier Club’s assertion in its oft-cited exhibition and catalogue of prints by women in 1901 that she was an engraver ‘mostly after the works of her noted son’, only four such works have been found or recorded.Footnote ²⁶ Her career thus challenges the historical assumption that women printmakers only produced or finished plates after their male relatives. In fact, collaborative and supportive working relationships between designers and engravers existed between members of this family outside gendered hierarchies. For example, in 1746, Cochin le père translated several of Cochin le jeune’s watercolours of the marital celebrations of Louis, Dauphin of France, into prints.

Two of the Hémery sisters, like the Horthemels, married into artistic families where their skills in printmaking were put to use.Footnote ²⁷ Thérèse-Éléonore married engraver Charles-Louis Lingée with whom she had at least five children. She continued to produce prints from the 1770s through to the 1789 French Revolution despite the demands of marriage and child-rearing. She often signed her work ‘Madame Lingée’, published prints through the family workshop, and, very occasionally, reproduced the designs of her husband. One of her most ambitious works in scale and technique – a chalk-manner engraving featuring the bust of the Apollo Belvedere – is a collaboration between husband and wife, signed ‘dessiné par C. L. Lingée’ and ‘Gravé par Mme Lingée son Epouse’.Footnote ²⁸ Still, the bulk of Thérèse-Éléonore’s oeuvre was unrelated to that of her husband. Even their penchants for subject matter and techniques were different: Thérèse-Éléonore tended to focus on portraiture, figure studies, and arabesques while Charles-Louis’s interests were somewhat more expansive, featuring more genre scenes and book illustration. Thérèse-Éléonore was also more experimental in her exploration of printmaking techniques while Charles-Louis stuck primarily to etching and engraving. And while Thérèse-Éléonore occasionally reproduced her spouse’s designs, Charles-Louis engraved a plate after a portrait designed ‘ad vivum [from life]’ by his daughter: a revolution-era print titled Victime de la Calomnie Gertrude.Footnote ²⁹

Marguerite Hémery had a more collaborative relationship to her husband’s artistic pursuits than her sister, demonstrating the variety of career paths and opportunities available to graveuses after marriage. Both Marguerite and her husband, engraver Nicolas Ponce, practised similar techniques (etching) and subject matter and even embarked on the same projects, particularly during the 1770s and 1780s. Ponce had trained in the ateliers of Étienne Fessard and Nicolas De Launay before joining a collaborative circle of designers and etchers with whom he became close friends, including Clément-Pierre Marillier.Footnote ³⁰ Marillier employed both Ponce and his wife to reproduce his designs for book illustrations alongside other well-known etchers. Though most often credited simply as ‘Madame Ponce’ upon her plates, Marguerite’s signature asserted her professional connection to her husband (whose work appeared alongside hers) as well as to the artistic lineage and circle his name invoked.

Several members of a single printmaking family were often employed for the same projects, such as large recueils that required the hands of many designers, engravers, and printers. For female engravers who faced difficulties achieving such commissions on their own, these projects served as unique opportunities to highlight their talents and further their careers. In 1781, for example, the newlywed Thérèse-Éléonore and Charles-Louis Lingée, Marguerite Hémery and her husband Nicolas Ponce, and their brother Antoine-François Hémery all contributed plates to the illustrious Cabinet Poullain, a series of 120 prints representing a large collection of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters. The project was executed under the direction of printseller and publisher, Pierre-François Basan.Footnote ³¹ Of the three siblings, Thérèse-Éléonore’s contribution was by far the most accomplished: her luxurious stipple engravings – with their soft edges, rounded forms, and subtle tone variations – stand in contrast to the somewhat grotesque figures found in her brother’s engravings and the clunky perspective of her sister’s. Her plate after a painting by Frans van Mieris the Elder – featuring a female Allegory of Art holding a painter’s palette, statuette, and theatrical mask (Figure 6.1) – was a particularly important work within the Cabinet Poullain and was referenced within the publication’s frontispiece, designed by painter and prominent art dealer, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun. The frontispiece depicts the same feminised allegory of ‘Painting’ with palette and theatrical mask sitting in a room displaying Poullain’s collection. Though similar allegorical representations occasionally spearheaded such publications, Le Brun was the previous owner of the original Allegory of Art by van Mieris and was thus likely drawing upon its themes in his design; he was also no stranger to the merits of real women in the arts as the husband to the soon-to-be académicienne and painter to Marie Antoinette, Élisabeth-Vigée Le Brun. Though perhaps fitting considering the painting’s subject matter, that Basan entrusted the reproduction of Allegory of Art to a female artist is more a testament to her skill as an engraver of crayon-manner prints (she was the sole artist to employ the technique in the entire publication) as well as an interpreter of masters of the Dutch Golden Age. The print also embodied the network of professional relationships underlying the Cabinet Poullain – from Poullain as collector, to Basan as publisher, to Le Brun as the prior owner of the painting, and to Thérèse-Éléonore as the engraver – thus legitimising the latter’s identity as a professional artist situated firmly within such networks. Thérèse-Éléonore’s contributions to the Cabinet Poullain and association with the professionals involved catapulted her career: she was accepted to the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in Marseille just four years after the ambitious publication.Footnote ³² Basan would later laud the graveuse in his Dictionnaire des graveurs anciens et modernes (1791) as an artist who ‘superiorly engraved in crayon manner’, particularly for her works featured in the Cabinet Poullain.Footnote ³³

Figure 6.1 Thérèse-Éléonore Hémery, femme Lingée (French, 1753–after 1814) after Frans van Mieris the Elder (Dutch, 1689–1763), Plate 59, Allegory of Art in Collection de cent-vingt estampes, gravées d’après les tableaux & dessins qui composoient le Cabinet de M. Poullain, c. 1781.

Etching, 19 × 13 cm. British Museum, London.

A Career of Their Own: Personal Connections and Professional Collaborations Outside of the Familial Atelier

In eighteenth-century France, engravers who were not members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris – men and women – were typically engaged in projects originating from one of four spheres of professional communities: first, that of the designers, printers, and publishers of the rue Saint-Jacques (and beyond) who often belonged to the Parisian artists’ guild; second, the community of fine-art collectors who sought to reproduce their collections in print; third, the designers and painters of the Académie royale who similarly engaged engravers to reproduce and disseminate their work; and finally, other government-run institutions, such as the Académie des sciences and the fine-arts academies of the provinces outside of Paris, which often employed engravers for various technical and artistic commissions. The Horthemels and Hémery sisters participated in all four of these spheres to varying degree. Though they were not official members of the Académie royale – an institution that only accepted four female members at any given time – the familial and community circumstances of the printmaking trade ensured continued work and, occasionally, provided access to institutions that were otherwise closed to them.

Despite their own lack of membership, the professional networks of the Horthemels sisters included personal ties to the artists of the Académie royale. Premier portrait painter to the King, Hyacinthe Rigaud, for example, was both the godfather of Marie-Anne Hyacinthe and commissioner of the printed portrait that can be most clearly attributed to the graveuse.Footnote ³⁴ Scholars such as James-Sarazin and Turner Edwards have argued that she utilised her godfather’s name as a claim of artistic legitimacy: her signature, ‘Marie Hyacinthe Horthemels sculpsit’, listed underneath her printed portrait of Cardinal de Bissy after Rigaud’s painting, links the original painting/painter and print/engraver while also guaranteeing the fidelity and quality of the reproductive work.Footnote ³⁵ Rigaud was not the only artist connected to the Académie royale with a close professional and personal connection to the Horthemels sisters – nor was he of the highest rank. Antoine Coypel, rector of the Académie, was present at the marriage between Marie-Anne Hyacinthe and Nicolas-Henri Tardieu just before his promotion to Director and First Painter to the King. As Edwards has shown in his 2019 thesis, the close relationship between the Horthemels and the Coypel clan is reflected not only in the prints by Tardieu after Coypel, but also by the role that Louise-Madeleine Horthemels played in the dissemination of the works of Coypel’s son.Footnote ³⁶ Furthermore, the presence of prints after another academy member in the oeuvre of Louise-Madeleine – that of Nicolas Lancret – is no coincidence: Lancret had a close personal relationship to the family as well, serving as godfather to Louise-Madeleine’s daughter.

The Horthemels sisters were intimately linked – both personally and professionally – to those who set the tone for the fine arts in eighteenth-century Paris: Rigaud, Coypel, Lancret, etc. These académiciens recognised the importance of engraving in the dissemination of their works and utilised family members and friends of both sexes to aid their artistic endeavours. Though the Horthemels sisters were not given academic membership, they nevertheless played important roles in the promotion of Academy members’ work and commercial distribution of their designs. By proudly signing their prints they created visual and textual connections between themselves and the work of the members of the Academy. Such projects suggest that female intaglio engravers could achieve prestigious commissions and build important professional relationships despite their lack of membership of the most well-respected institution for the arts in France.

It is important to remember that membership to the Parisian Académie royale was not the only barometer of an engraver’s professional reputation and skill. Though they did not carry the same prestige as the famous Parisian institution, the provincial fine-arts academies offered desirable professional opportunities for artists, such as the exhibition of their work and, thus, commissions and financial benefits from collectors and connoisseurs. The provincial academies and those abroad were also more open to those who could not achieve membership in the country’s capital, including women. It has often been assumed that women who achieved positions within these academies did so via a male relative who, upon his own acceptance, put in a good word. This was not the case for Thérèse-Éléonore Hémery, who was accepted to the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in Marseille in 1785, one year before her brother, Antoine-François, and three years before her brother-in-law, Nicolas Ponce.Footnote ³⁷ Though she likely did not attend classes as a student at the academy, nor was she accepted to teach or hold a studio within its confines, Thérèse-Éléonore was accepted as an associé agréé, a class of professional artists considered separate from honorary amateurs.Footnote ³⁸ Thérèse-Éléonore was still living and working in Paris in 1785 and had sent in several examples of her work to the Academy in Marseille. The story of her acceptance – transcribed via letters between Thérèse-Éléonore and the Académie’s secretary, Monsieur Moulinneuf – provides unequivocal evidence that she pursued career distinctions in her own right and affirms the role of professional networks unrelated to the familial atelier on the careers of eighteenth-century graveuses en taille-douce.Footnote ³⁹

According to the letters, Thérèse-Éléonore had been recommended for membership by the Marseille academy’s own director (and painter to the King), Jean-Jacques Bachelier. Moulinneuf joined Bachelier in his admiration of Thérèse-Éléonore’s work and requested that the director sign her certificate of acceptance before personally handing it to her, thus suggesting a professional relationship or friendship between the two. Bachelier was a member of the Académie royale in Paris and professor at a drawing school there. He seems to have been invested in Thérèse-Éléonore’s career, but he was also interested in the education of young women more generally. In 1789, Bachelier published his Mémoire sur l’éducation des filles in which he proposed the establishment of an institute – capable of accommodating 200 girls at the expense of the nation – where they could acquire ‘useful knowledge relating to the various professions they could take up’, particularly ‘those of all works which have the arts as their object and of which drawing is the basis’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Perhaps it was because of Thérèse-Éléonore’s proficiency in creating crayon-manner prints used for art students’ study of dessin that the two struck a professional connection that ultimately led to her acceptance to the Marseille academy.

To end this chapter, it is important to note that the career of a graveuse was not entirely dictated by the outer guidance and opportunities awarded via her personal and professional relationships; often, these women exercised independent ambition and initiative to ensure their reputations and futures through the careful navigation of these networks. The letters between Moulinneuf and Thérèse-Éléonore reveal how adept the latter was at securing her membership to the Marseille academy via personal flattery towards both Moulinneuf and the institution. After Moulinneuf assures the graveuse of the ‘superiority of [her] talents in the art of engraving’ and relays that her works were placed on display in the Académie’s salon de peinture, Thérèse-Éléonore replies with the following:

Amongst the conventional flatteries and adulations, Thérèse-Éléonore makes clear her own professional ambitions – to become a member of the Académie, to receive her diploma, and to continue exhibiting work – all of which are separate from the careers of her husband or brother-in-law. According to Moulinneuf’s reply a month later, Thérèse-Éléonore’s suggestion to send more prints ‘to pay tribute’ to the Marseille academy was met with ‘the greatest satisfaction’, and the secretary proclaimed that her work would remain on display in the salon de peinture for the pleasure of artists and connoisseurs alike.Footnote ⁴² The graveuse again replied with the ‘deepest gratitude’ and promised to continue producing work for the Académie: ‘It is up to me to make new efforts to make me worthy of all the interest which the Académie wishes to honor me.’ Thérèse-Éléonore’s willingness to promptly fulfil her duties as an associé agréé set quite an example: when her brother Antoine-François attempted to apply to the Marseille academy in 1786, he was chastised by Moulinneuf for not sending in several proofs of his work like his sister, an ‘aimable and worthy artist’ whose professional behaviour should be emulated.Footnote ⁴³ On her part, Thérèse-Éléonore continued to draw an association between herself and the Marseille academy by signing future prints, ‘Gravé par Mme Lingée de l’Académie Royale de Marseille’ – a mark of her professional ambitions that are still visible today, tucked within the portfolios and illustrated books found within our most revered archives.Footnote ⁴⁴

Conclusion

By utilising an evidence-based approach to compare, contrast, and contextualise the Horthemels and Hémery sisters’ training, familial collaborations, and professional achievements, I have demonstrated the variety of individual paths available to eighteenth-century graveuses en taille-douce, thus calling into question the enforcement of any unified female identity or group consciousness. Though it is important to attend to the obstacles (or opportunities) these artists may have faced due to their gender, the aim of this chapter was not to present the Horthemels or Hémery sisters as victims or heroines of their circumstances. When it came to the eighteenth-century graveuse en taille-douce the legitimacy of their work was not necessarily based on their status as exceptions to their sex; nor was it primarily due to their participation in traditional artistic modes of ‘genius’ or inventiveness. Above all, a series of personal and professional networks of friends, family, and community members connected the Horthemels and Hémery sisters to career opportunities and avenues of success; but it was ultimately the sisters themselves who navigated these networks to seek training, support the family workshop, and embark on careers of their own.

In 1767, Pierre François Basan (1723–1797) published his two-volume Dictionnaire des graveurs anciens et modernes depuis l’origine de la gravure, a work that would quickly become a standard printmaking reference on the library shelves of European print collectors.Footnote ¹ As a professional printmaker turned print publisher, printseller, and auction specialist, Basan was embedded in the networks of the international print industry.Footnote ² The twenty-six women, predominantly French, included in these volumes were a small fraction of the printmakers identified.Footnote ³ Like their male counterparts in eighteenth-century France, most were professional printmakers who specialised in replicating the designs of other artists.Footnote ⁴ When Basan brought out the second, expanded edition of his Dictionnaire in 1789, he nearly tripled the number of entries on women printmakers – evidence that women artists had come to play a greater role in the expansion and diversification of the print market in the decades leading up to the French Revolution.Footnote ⁵

One printmaker Basan listed in both editions was Catherine Élisabeth Cousinet (born 1726), also known as Madame Lempereur through her marriage to fellow printmaker Louis Simon Lempereur (1728–1807).Footnote ⁶ Basan cited her engravings La Pyramide de Sextius and Les Trois Colonnes de Campo Vaccino, after pendant paintings by the eighteenth-century Roman view painter Giovanni Paolo Panini, as two of her most significant works (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). These same prints were praised in the December 1760 issue of the French journal L’Année littéraire by the editor and art critic Élie Catherine Fréron, who noted that the paintings were dedicated to the ‘amateur’ Marguerite Le Comte, who also owned them. Fréron not only praised Cousinet’s works as ‘pleasing’ and ‘well made’, but also cited them as emblematic of eighteenth-century ‘progress’:

Cousinet ‘truly succeeded’, but what, we might ask, does the career of a successful woman professional printmaker in eighteenth-century France look like? And how do we even measure success, much less attempt to flesh out a biographical narrative, given the dearth of historical information and the predominance of male voices? An assessment of the life and work of Catherine Élisabeth Cousinet gestures towards some answers.

Figure 7.1 Catherine Élisabeth Cousinet, after Giovanni Paolo Panini, La Pyramide de Sextius, 1760.

Etching and engraving, 31.5 × 36.4 cm (cut to image). British Museum, London.

Figure 7.2 Catherine Élisabeth Cousinet, after Giovanni Paolo Panini, Les Trois Colonnes de Campo Vaccino, 1760.

Etching and engraving, 31.5 × 36.5 cm (cut to image). British Museum, London.

As with most eighteenth-century French professional printmakers, male and female alike, very little is known about Cousinet’s early career.Footnote ⁸ Most reproductive engravers began their training as teenagers.Footnote ⁹ For comparison one might point to Cousinet’s contemporary Claire Tournay (1731–1773), the future (second) wife of professional printmaker Jacques Nicolas Tardieu. An impression of Tournay’s 1750 engraving Le Miroir, after François Boucher, is annotated ‘Second plate of Mlle. Tournay, given in March 1750’, that is, when she was eighteen or nineteen.Footnote ¹⁰

More often than not, the main figures in the early biographies of women artists are men. Most women artists in early modern Europe were taught by members of their families, be it a father, brother, husband, or uncle.Footnote ¹¹ Such support was essential: women artists lacked access to the educational and professional opportunities enjoyed by their male counterparts. Sister engravers Rose Angélique Moitte (active 1768–1781) and Élisabeth Mélanie Moitte (active late eighteenth century), for example, learned the trade from their father Pierre Étienne Moitte (1722–1780); in fact, all six of his children took up careers in the arts.Footnote ¹² Cousinet, however, does not appear to have hailed from a family of printmakers.Footnote ¹³

Acknowledging its limitations, the information provided by Cousinet’s first two biographers is nonetheless a useful starting point in considering her career. Basan, in his Dictionnaire’s second edition (1789), stated that Cousinet studied with Étienne Fessard (1714–1777) and Laurent Cars (1699–1771).Footnote ¹⁴ The German print scholar Carl Heinrich von Heineken wrote in his Dictionnaire des artistes dont nous avons des estampes (1790) that Cousinet had been instructed by Pierre Aveline II (1702–1760).Footnote ¹⁵ Both authors make pointed use of Cousinet’s maiden name in discussions of her work, which signifies that she was an established printmaker well before she married Louis Simon Lempereur in c. 1756.Footnote ¹⁶

It was unusual for women artists to operate on their own. Invariably, most navigated existing male-dominated networks of the art world. And yet it has too often been assumed that male artists guided the careers – and may even have executed the work – of their female students.Footnote ¹⁷ Certainly Fessard’s work with amateur women printmakers, including King Louis XV’s official mistress Madame de Pompadour and Louise Le Daulceur, was well known.Footnote ¹⁸ In the case of Aveline II, there are records of early states of two undated compositions signed with Cousinet’s name, now lost, in two prominent late eighteenth-century European print collections: Le Charme de la musique and Le Triomphe de Flore.Footnote ¹⁹ It was customary in the printmaking industry for engravers to sign their names to plates made in part, if not in full, by their apprentices, assistants, and/or subcontractors.Footnote ²⁰ It is entirely plausible that Cousinet worked with Aveline, Cars, and Fessard, though the first projects that firmly connected Cousinet with these established professional printmakers date from the mid-1750s, when she was around thirty years old.

The earliest work by Cousinet for which her authorship and the dating can be ascertained, however, links her to yet another printmaker, the aforementioned Pierre Étienne Moitte, who published her engraving Le Bénédicité Flamant after a painting by the seventeenth-century French artist Louis Le Nain.Footnote ²¹ In the lettering below the image that informed interested parties where to obtain impressions of Cousinet’s engraving, the listing of Moitte’s address on a previously unrecorded state corresponds with other prints he made and published between 1747 and 1752.Footnote ²² When Moitte moved, he updated his address on the plate.Footnote ²³

It usually took years to master control of the burin and gain fluency in the visual language of reproductive engraving. The achievement of Le Bénédicité Flamant shows Cousinet to be fully in command of her métier. Akin to how most eighteenth-century French professional printmakers would have worked, Cousinet made Le Bénédicité Flamant through a combination of etching and engraving in a proportion expertly tailored to the style and subject of her source. She dexterously employed the burin, articulating the details that imbued Le Nain’s peasants with dignity and translating the tonal range of the painter’s composition – from the brightly lit foreground figures to the hearth’s soft glow and to the dark recesses of the armoire in the background.

Cousinet’s next prints arose out of endeavours to provide engravings of several European art collections in the 1750s. So ambitious were these projects that they necessitated the efforts of numerous European printmakers over many years. For example, Aveline, Cars, Fessard, and Moitte all contributed engravings to two enterprises that reproduced important paintings in Dresden: the Recueil d’Estampes d’après les plus célèbres Tableaux de la Galerie Royale de Dresde (1753, 1757) and the Galerie du comte de Brühl (1754). Both undertakings were overseen by Heineken, then the director of the Dresden print room and formerly the secretary and librarian for the comte de Brühl.Footnote ²⁴

Although Cousinet does not appear to have made prints for either enterprise, she did engrave Le Moulin de Quinquengrogne after Nicolas Lancret’s painting that hailed from Heineken’s own collection.Footnote ²⁵ Published by Moitte, this print of a charming mill scene outside Paris was made before February 1757, when Heineken sold the painting in Paris.Footnote ²⁶ Because the calligraphic and tremulous quality of etched lines was so well suited for depicting atmospheric skies and verdant foliage, this intaglio technique often predominated in landscape prints, as it does in Cousinet’s soft and shimmering Le Moulin de Quinquengrogne. Here the engraved marks accent the architectural structure of the mill and impart solidity to tree trunks; they strengthen shadows and enhance modelling and the variegated play of light and dark.

Around this time Cousinet also reproduced François Boucher’s Départ de Jacob painting in another famous collection in Paris, that of Claude Alexandre de Villeneuve, the comte de Vence, lieutenant-général du roi.Footnote ²⁷ The engraving of the comte de Vence’s collection, in the words of W. McAllister-Johnson, occasioned a ‘printmaking laboratory’ in that the project brought together a range of artists, including many young and lesser-known professional printmakers; Cousinet was the only woman to engrave one of the paintings. In January 1757 in L’Année littéraire, Fréron announced Cousinet’s Départ de Jacob, after Boucher, stating that she engraved it for Cars.Footnote ²⁸ Boucher’s Départ de Jacob painting, made in the manner of the seventeenth-century Genoese artist Castiglione – and, notably, Cousinet’s print after it – were subsequently cited in the discussion of the comte de Vence’s collections in Antoine Nicolas Dezallier d’Argenville’s 1757 guidebook to Paris.Footnote ²⁹ So, too, were painting and print listed in the book commissioned by the comte de Vence to describe his collection in 1759 and in the catalogue of his posthumous auction in February 1761.Footnote ³⁰

Presumably Cousinet made Départ de Jacob in 1756 (if not earlier). In his discussion of the print Fréron identifies Cousinet as ‘Madame Lempereur’, which parallels the inscription of her maiden and married names in the plate. Lempereur also studied with the reproductive engraver Aveline II – did Cousinet and Lempereur meet through him, if not through the larger community of printmakers in Paris?Footnote ³¹ No one – man or woman – could participate and establish themself in the French printmaking industry without relationships and networks. In lieu of a family of printmakers, Cousinet’s initial art world connections were allied with and built on those of Aveline, Cars, Fessard, and Moitte. By marrying her fellow reproductive printmaker Louis Simon Lempereur in c. 1756, Cousinet became part of a professional alliance that would expand her network and offer greater opportunities to participate in the print market, not least because Lempereur possessed the means to publish, distribute, and sell her engravings.Footnote ³²

Indeed, in the late 1750s the husband Lempereur’s star was on the rise. Although no female professional printmakers became members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in pre-revolutionary France,Footnote ³³ Lempereur, for his part, became a provisional member (agréé) of this prestigious arts institution in Paris in 1759, garnering him the privilege of exhibiting his work in the biennial public Salon at the Louvre.Footnote ³⁴ At the very least, Cousinet could benefit from his expanding circle and heightened visibility.

In addition to engraving contemporary French paintings and portraits, Louis Simon Lempereur also was actively involved in engraving book illustrations, which from the mid-1750s forward became a mainstay of his work.Footnote ³⁵ One of the most prominent illustrated book enterprises underway in Paris at this time was the new edition of the seventeenth-century French poet Jean de La Fontaine’s Les Fables, with illustrations based on Jean Baptiste Oudry’s designs. Les Fables, like many eighteenth-century book projects, was long in the making, its four volumes published from 1755 to 1759. The engraving of the illustrated plates took place under the direction of Charles Nicolas Cochin II, official secretary to the Académie royale and one of the foremost illustrators, draftsmen, and printmakers of his time.Footnote ³⁶ Cousinet engraved one plate, which was published in the fourth and last volume.Footnote ³⁷ When the completed publication was written up in the prestigious Journal des sçavans in 1760, Cousinet was the only woman among the more than twenty printmakers – including Aveline II, Moitte, Fessard, Cars, and Lempereur – mentioned by name in conjunction with the illustrations.Footnote ³⁸

For printmakers, there were many benefits to be had in engraving book illustrations. The publisher – or the contractor who was overseeing the engraving of the illustrations – could easily farm out the plates to several printmakers, compensating them by the plate. Usually small in scale, such prints could be executed relatively quickly. It was stable work, providing a steady source of income, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century when there was a burgeoning market for illustrated books.Footnote ³⁹ The book trade was also a form of commerce that had long involved women.Footnote ⁴⁰

Cousinet also made one plate for the 1757 edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone,Footnote ⁴¹ a project to which Lempereur contributed as well, but it appears that engraving book illustrations would never be a specialty of hers, as it was for her husband. In this way Cousinet did not adopt the spousal strategy taken by Renée Élisabeth Lépicié (née Marlié) (1714–1773), the subjects of her reproductive engravings of the 1740s closely paralleling those of her husband François Bernard Lépicié, be they seventeenth-century Dutch genre scenes or the eighteenth-century French compositions under their influence.Footnote ⁴²

Cousinet distinguished her work by focusing on single-sheet engravings of paintings, primarily landscapes, but sometimes also genre scenes. In the December 1758 issue of the Mercure de France, Moitte advertised four engravings he had ‘recently engraved’ after the paintings of the seventeenth-century Flemish artist David Teniers. Although Cousinet was not cited in the announcement by name, she was the engraver of the first composition on the list, La Crédule Laitière.Footnote ⁴³ This print, along with her single-sheet engravings Le Bénédicité Flamant, Le Moulin de Quinquengrogne, and Départ de Jacob, demonstrated how Cousinet could interpret paintings of various genres, centuries, and styles. But there was considerable competition for such work in Paris. When the Swedish printmaker Per Gustaf Floding wrote to his patron the comte de Tessin in June 1759, he stressed: ‘It is very difficult to find beautiful paintings to engrave, even though this capital is well endowed with them.’Footnote ⁴⁴ And here Cousinet’s husband’s professional standing and art world connections proved fruitful for her future endeavours.

Louis Simon Lempereur worked with and was close to several amateurs – cosmopolitan, like-minded collectors who embraced drawing and printmaking to enhance their connoisseurship, expand their art historical knowledge, and forge social bonds within the milieu of the French cultural elite. Chief among Lempereur’s amateur connections was Claude Henri Watelet, for whom Rembrandt’s etchings were a passion.Footnote ⁴⁵ Watelet also wrote about art. His authorship of the epic poem L’Art de peindre, published in 1760, led to his appointment to the Académie française. It was Lempereur who helped Watelet etch and engrave the illustrations for this publication based on the designs of the rising history painter Jean Baptiste Marie Pierre.Footnote ⁴⁶ Watelet’s companion Marguerite Le Comte, with whom he would travel to Italy in 1763–1764, was herself a collector and amateur etcher.Footnote ⁴⁷

Le Comte possessed Panini’s two paintings of architectural capricci, imaginary compositions in which he generalised upon antique ruins, that Cousinet engraved (Figures 7.1 and 7.2) and Lempereur published.Footnote ⁴⁸ Fréron’s praise for Cousinet’s engravings, cited at the outset of this chapter, broadcasts the meaningful relationship between female printmaker and collector. As the announcement noted, because Le Comte had kindly lent her paintings La Pyramide de Sextius and Les Trois Colonnes de Campo Vaccino to Cousinet, the printmaker honoured and curried favour with her patron by dedicating both prints to her. Le Comte’s ownership of the paintings is recorded on Cousinet’s prints themselves, the elegantly engraved lettering interlinking patron and artist, valorising the latter’s status. Women collectors, and by extension women collector dedicatees, were unusual in eighteenth-century France. Two of the most important precedents were the comtesse de Verrue, who collected seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings,Footnote ⁴⁹ and Madame de Pompadour, who favoured eighteenth-century French creations.Footnote ⁵⁰

The Lempereurs’ relationship with Watelet and Le Comte continued bearing fruit. In 1762, Cousinet engraved Le Calme and La Tempête, after Joseph Vernet’s pendant paintings of seascapes from Watelet’s collection, dedicating both to the amateur.Footnote ⁵¹ Published and sold by her husband, Cousinet’s engravings were promoted in no fewer than three journals that summer.Footnote ⁵² The prints couldn’t be issued at a more propitious time, as the famous painter had settled in Paris in 1762 after spending years in Italy and then travelling in France. Vernet’s most important commission was to paint a series of large-scale canvases of the ports of France for the monarchy;Footnote ⁵³ it was his cabinet paintings of seascapes, however, that built his international reputation.Footnote ⁵⁴ The time was ripe, accordingly, to offer engravings of Vernet paintings for sale.Footnote ⁵⁵ Eighteenth-century taste encouraging the collecting and display of pendant prints promised a doubling of profits.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is not difficult to imagine Cousinet’s prints after the ‘calm’ and ‘storm’ imagery of Vernet’s paintings serving as forms of entertainment in social gatherings. Viewers could delight in comparing and contrasting the effects of weather on sky and sea, appreciate the various motifs of ships and rocky coastlines, and concoct narratives based on their reading of the anecdotal figure details, especially the unfolding drama of the shipwreck.

Did Cousinet’s reproductive engravings of Vernet’s seascapes catch the attention of the younger and less-established professional printmaker Anne Philiberte Coulet (b. 1736), prompting her to approach Lempereur as a publisher for her own prints?Footnote ⁵⁷ Coulet’s first known engraving, La Belle Après-dinée, after Vernet, was published and advertised in L’Avant-Coureur in December 1762 by the printseller Denis Charles Buldet,Footnote ⁵⁸ but by the following year Coulet was working with Lempereur. From 1763 to 1776, Lempereur published eight of her engravings,Footnote ⁵⁹ beginning with Le Départ de la chaloupe and L’Heureux passage, two of her ‘superbly executed’ engravings after paintings by the ‘immortal Vernet’, as praised by Fréron in L’Année littéraire in December 1763.Footnote ⁶⁰ Coulet found support for her work with the Lempereurs, and they, in turn, benefited from publishing and selling her reproductive prints.

Basan and Heineken identify Lempereur as Coulet’s teacher, but might not Cousinet have played a role in mentoring Coulet as well?Footnote ⁶¹ It is tempting to imagine that a mutual support system emerged between these two women printmakers. In June 1765, Lempereur published and advertised Cousinet’s engraving Les Commerçants Turcs, after a Vernet from the collection of Armand Pierre François de Chastre de Billy, premier valet de garde-robe du roi.Footnote ⁶² Earlier that same year Lempereur published Coulet’s Les Pêcheurs napolitains, also after a Vernet from the comte de Billy’s collection.Footnote ⁶³ Did Cousinet’s opportunity to engrave Les Commerçants Turcs arise through the connections of her husband or of Coulet? The lettering on Les Commerçants Turcs, intriguingly, was engraved by another woman artist who signed her name to the plate at lower right: ‘Jeanne Louise Coulet Scrip.’ There is precious little information on this professional letterer, but surely she was related to – and most likely a sister of – Anne Philiberte Coulet.Footnote ⁶⁴ In fact Jeanne Louise Coulet also engraved the lettering for Anne Philiberte Coulet’s aforementioned Les Pêcheurs napolitains and its pendant Les Pêcheurs florentins, also after a Vernet in the comte de Billy’s collection, published by Lempereur in 1766.Footnote ⁶⁵

Cousinet’s Les Commerçants Turcs lacked a dedicatee. Although the comte de Billy’s ownership of Vernet’s painting is duly noted in the lettering, Cousinet’s name takes centre stage below the image, broadcasting its creation by a woman artist.Footnote ⁶⁶ And broadcast her work abroad such prints did. In the eighteenth century, an international network of art agents ensured that French reproductive engravings could be acquired by a wealthy and cosmopolitan clientele spread across Europe. ‘If in any of the arts the French have been and are superior to the rest of Europe, it most undoubtedly is in that of engraving.’ This assertion was made in 1769 by the English writer Arthur Young, his statement prefacing his praise for Cousinet’s (and Coulet’s) expertise in interpreting Vernet’s paintings, Les Commerçants Turcs among them.Footnote ⁶⁷

Collectors eager to acquire the pendant engraving to Cousinet’s Les Commerçants Turcs had to wait until 1772 for the publication of Les Suites d’un naufrage, also after a Vernet painting in the comte de Billy’s collection. With their detailed burin work, reproductive engravings could take months – sometimes even years – to execute. Here we are reminded as well of the overwhelmingly invisible labour performed by women which imposed other demands on Cousinet’s time. To what extent was she increasingly devoted to helping Lempereur run the business, to say nothing of caring for their daughter Geneviève Françoise Sophie (c. 1762–1775)?Footnote ⁶⁸ The lettering of Les Suites d’un naufrage explains that the composition was etched by Nicolas Delaunay, a student of Lempereur, and finished in burin by Cousinet.Footnote ⁶⁹ As with Cousinet’s other prints advertised by her husband, the release of this long-awaited engraving was featured in several French journal advertisements, providing information that was in turn picked up by discriminating editors of German periodicals.Footnote ⁷⁰

In 1776, the publication Almanach historique et raisonné des architectes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs et cizeleurs offered a guide to the French art scene. Although Cousinet doesn’t have her own entry – her ‘talents’ are praised under those of her husband – she is the only woman mentioned in the section on printmakers who excelled in historical subjects.Footnote ⁷¹ A few women have entries in the section devoted to printmakers specialising in landscapes and seascapes, including Coulet, though she is erroneously referred to – and her identity confused with – the ‘wife of Lempereur’.Footnote ⁷² With similar names, professions, and subjects – not to mention their mutual publisher, Lempereur – the confusion of Cousinet and Coulet in the Almanach historique may have been an honest mistake, but it nonetheless feels like a slight: both artists had worked for years in a male-dominated industry to establish their respective reputations as reproductive engravers.

When Laurent Guiard, first sculptor to the duc de Parme, wrote to an Italian colleague in October 1783 during his visit to Paris, he spoke of seeing ‘beautiful things by the sister of M. Cousinet’, referring to her brother, Jean Baptiste Cousinet, adjunct sculptor to Guiard in Parma.Footnote ⁷³ After this mention, however, the trail goes cold.Footnote ⁷⁴ As with many eighteenth-century women printmakers, even Cousinet’s date of death is unknown.Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet the continued listing of her prints in European auction catalogues underscores a widespread recognition of her oeuvre.Footnote ⁷⁶ It is hoped that my reassessment of Cousinet’s life and work suggests both a certain success and the historical hindrances that make her only so visible to us. Over the course of three decades, Cousinet created an impressive range of engravings after European paintings owned by important and well-appointed individuals in Paris, cosmopolitan capital of Europe. Her connections to these collectors integrated her into networks in the French printmaking industry and, by extension, abroad. Eliciting respect and admiration, the professional achievements of Cousinet offer tantalizing glimpses of what an eighteenth-century French woman professional printmaker might have been.

Even though more than a century and a half separates Laura Piranesi’s artistic activity and this chapter’s opening epigraph excerpted from Virginia Woolf, these words may well pertain to the artist and printmaker who, despite her talent, was not as well-known as her illustrious father, Giovanni Battista Piranesi.Footnote ² From childhood onward, the daughter of the great printmaker and architect breathed the fertile and creative atmosphere of a laboratory crowded with assistants. This was the intaglio workshop and studio that Giambattista had opened in Rome’s Palazzo Tomati, Strada Felice – ‘vicino alla Trinità de’ Monti’, as it was written at the bottom of the prints he conceived, created, and sold at that address, in the so-called Street of the Artists. Laura’s work until now has only been marginally cited in dictionaries and in biographies about her father and to a lesser degree about her older brother Francesco.Footnote ³ Although the great celebrity of her father has long eclipsed her etchings, this chapter brings to light for the first time biographical information and important milestones in Laura Piranesi’s life based on newly discovered documents in Roman archives. Further, always treated within the context of her father’s and brother’s production, her prints have yet to be catalogued separately and studied for their own merit. Befitting her inclusion in a volume dedicated to women and print, this chapter endeavours to enhance our knowledge of Laura Piranesi’s life and work.

To date, only twenty prints have been ascribed to Laura Piranesi,Footnote ⁴ and all represent views of Rome, a venture similar to her father’s which earned him widespread acclaim. Nevertheless, these prints reveal that she was an accomplished printmaker. In her lifetime, contemporary critics lauded her talent and elegant style:

Laura’s known vedute (cityscapes or vistas) take up some architectural subjects and the perspective of her father’s most famous views in a smaller format. On the copperplates after her name, we read incise or sculp, both meaning ʻetchedʼ, a clear indication of the fact she made the etching by herself, and above all, that she reinterpreted the paternal views with brighter chiaroscuro and a few changes to the composition signalling that she was the inventor of the design. If we look at her etching style and technique, and especially if we reflect on the idea behind the composition, we understand that there is a certain difference between the two artistic visions. As Mario Bevilacqua and Heather Hyde Minor have pointed out, Giambattista conceived his etchings as illustrations in books, therefore always in a tight dialogue with written texts. In this way he must be considered as the author of books in their entirety, texts and images intertwined.Footnote ⁶ While her father maintains a somewhat scientific and archaeological approach, filling the composition with reference numbers and notes, and a crowded under-title legend specifying historical details with long descriptions, Laura’s plates are easier to enjoy. They convey a fresh and peaceful view of landscape, monuments, and archaeological ruins; her graceful scenes are animated by characters engaged in daily gestures, contributing to a representation of the life of the Eternal City.

A Family Business

Laura Maria Gertrude Piranesi was born in Rome in the late summer of 1754. While we do not know the exact date of her birth, we do know that she was baptized in the church of San Francesco ai Monti on 17 September.Footnote ⁷ Her godfather was Monsignor Guido Bottari, brother of the more famous Giovanni Gaetano (Florence 1689 – Rome 1775), scholar, theologian, philologist, archaeologist, and librarian, and protector of Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the Eternal City since the early years of his residence, in the 1740s. Laura was the eldest daughter of Giovanni Battista, who identifies himself as ‘architetto Veneziano’ and of Angela (or Angelica in some documents) Pasquini, daughter of Domenico, gardener of the Corsini princes, who lived in the palace of the Florentine nobles across the Tiber on Via della Lungara. Giovanni Battista had married Angela the previous year in Santa Maria (Trastevere), the parish to which Angela belonged, and this marriage brought him a dowry of 300 scudi which he put towards a supply of huge copperplates, allowing him to establish and sustain his independent career as a vedute maker.Footnote ⁸

It is, in fact, thanks to Angela’s personal assets that Piranesi’s early years were a period of professional growth and investment for his activities as a printmaker in Rome. Prior to their marriage, Piranesi had already etched a certain number of plates of the Views of Rome, intended for individual publication or in series of varying numbers, and had published thirty-four of these with Jean (Giovanni) Bouchard, a French publisher and bookseller originally from the Provencal Alps near Briançon, who arrived in Rome in the early 1740s.Footnote ⁹

The French bookseller published many of Piranesi’s works starting with the first edition of the Invenzioni capricciose di carceri, and then the Opere varie di architettura and the Magnificenze. Only in 1761 did Piranesi stop his collaboration with Bouchard and move his residence and his chalcography laboratory to Palazzo Tomati in Strada Felice (via Sistina, 48), where he started printing on his own. Laura, who was about seven years old at the time of the move grew up between her home and the studio-workshop. The name Laura is the name of Giovanni Battista’s mother, chosen following a family tradition that tells us of his attachment to his Venetian homeland. Two other siblings were born: Francesco (c. 1759) and Faustina Clementina Ludovica, baptized on 3 January 1761 in Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, but who died prematurely. Angelo (1763), Anna Maria (1766), and Pietro (1768) followed. The first biographers – Giovanni Ludovico Bianconi and Giovanni Gori Gandellini – report that the two eldest sons continued the family business and Bianconi affirms that all the children were ‘raised in the way of the fine arts’.Footnote ¹⁰

Consequently, it appears that Laura was educated to follow in her father’s footsteps. While Francesco was trained by the best masters according to Giovanni Battista, who clearly directed him towards the archaeological survey, Laura had been directed by her father towards the veduta, a genre much appreciated by foreign tourists, and perhaps a trendy and fashionable theme for the English culture that Piranesi knew well. It seems probable that Piranesi’s father thought of organizing his business by diversifying the artistic abilities of his children, to entrust each of them with a branch of the family business; Laura probably would have been responsible for the production of small-size views, which were easy-to-sell souvenirs.

Although there is little documentation about Laura’s early experience in the studio and her training in the techniques of etching, it is likely that Laura learned by watching the activities in the busy studio, and that she practised copying smaller versions of her father’s large views of Rome. The artistic education of a young woman in eighteenth-century Italy followed established protocols based on family wealth and class. Perhaps Laura’s artistic education was similar to that of Angelika Kauffmann (1741 Chur – Rome 1807), the Swiss painter who was thirteen years older than she was. Kauffmann’s precocious talent was nurtured by the study of plaster models and prints owned by her father and enhanced by trips to Parma, Modena, and Bologna to see the Carraccis, Guido Reni, and Guercino, and finally to Rome, where Pompeo Batoni made nude drawings available for her to copy. Furthermore, Giovanni Battista Piranesi himself seems to have given her lessons in perspective.Footnote ¹¹ While we are not aware of any other female artists who worked in his workshop, we can speculate on what Laura may have learned in her father’s studio based on what is known about other eighteenth-century women artists and especially Giovanni’s contributions to their training and knowledge of their published work. If Laura’s father in the mid-1760s gave architectural drawing lessons to the young Kauffmann who was active above all in the field of portraiture and eager to tackle history painting, it is possible that he also found it natural to teach his own daughter perspective rules in view of her contribution to the family business. Likewise, Maddalena, the daughter of Piranesi’s first publisher-bookseller Jean Bouchard, who was three years older than Laura, engraved illustrations for volumes of botany that were sold in the paternal workshop on the ground floor of Palazzo Mellini, opposite San Marcello, in via del Corso.Footnote ¹²

Giovanni Battista was the undisputed head of the entire organization, and at his death (in 1778), in the absence of a will, according to the statutory law of Rome (in the sense of a local authority of the Papal State), it was the eldest son who should inherit the entire paternal estate.Footnote ¹³ According to Jacques Guillaume Legrand’s biography, no decision was made regarding the succession as Francesco, due to his young age, was feared unfit to manage the family business.Footnote ¹⁴ The entire worth of the business was 60,000 scudi.Footnote ¹⁵ We learn from the documents that as soon as their father had died, Francesco wanted to liquidate Laura’s dowry and get her married immediately in order to get rid of her and thus take over the business. He had no other ‘rivals’ among the rest of the family as Anna Maria was a nun and both Angelo and Pietro were too young. The dowry agreed upon for Laura was a rather meagre sum: 800 scudi established by her father when he was still alive, and 1,500, which was further raised to 2,650 by Francesco after his father’s death.Footnote ¹⁶

Laura did marry that year. In addition to the biographical details disclosed by Heather Hyde Minor,Footnote ¹⁷ documents newly discovered while researching the archives for this chapter indicate that she wed Josef Anton Schwerzmann on 8 December 1778. Schwerzmann, of Swiss origin, was born in Rome on 22 March 1754. Laura and her husband relied on her dowry to begin commercial activities in via Frattina. In 1780, Laura and Josef had a daughter, Luisa Clara Maria Gertrude Fortunata Schwerzmann.Footnote ¹⁸

Laura’s Views of Rome

As Heather Hyde Minor and John Pinto observe, Legrand’s biography ‘emphasises the role played by Piranesi’s son, Francesco (1759–1810), in completing a number of projects that were underway at the time of his father’s death in 1778’;Footnote ¹⁹ but Legrand and other Piranesi biographers of the nineteenth century remain silent as to Laura’s artistic production, simply mentioning her together with her brother Francesco at the bottom of notes about their father. A small yet important exception to this neglect lies in the aforementioned comment by Ludovico Bianconi in Antologia Romana (1779) which highlights the remarkable quality of her prints. It should be said that Gori Gandellini also notes her technical abilities, likening her work to her brother Francesco’s (but incorrectly giving her birth date as 1850!),Footnote ²⁰ while Nagler and Thieme-Becker note that she produced small Roman views which she etched in the manner of, or after, her father’s designs.Footnote ²¹ Laura has her own entry in a 1799 German handbook for art lovers and collectors that states that she excelled in the art of engraving no less than her brother Francesco, and an English Biographical Dictionary of 1806 notes that Laura ‘engraved a set of views in the manner of her father with great success’ (the entry gives an incorrect date for her death).Footnote ²²

A first biography, albeit short, dedicated to her, independent from her father and brother, appears in Michael Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers.Footnote ²³ It was only in 1923 that A. M. Hind, art historian and curator of the Prints Department of the British Museum, published a note in which he reported the acquisition by that museum of a volume containing over sixty views of Rome, eighteen of which bear the signature of Laura Piranesi.Footnote ²⁴ These are etchings with dimensions of about 130 (height) by 200 (width) mm, reproducing various views of the city with ancient and modern monuments. Another collective volume, which contains twenty views signed by Laura together with forty-eight others from the Antichità Romane by her father Giovanni Battista, is kept at the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; BAV).Footnote ²⁵ Also, several loose sheets signed by Laura are preserved in various public collections around the world: twenty loose print-views are kept in the Quirinale collection, almost all representing the same subjects as the British Museum volume. The following is a list of subjects of Laura’s views traced in Italian and foreign public collections:

1. 1. Veduta di San Giovanni in Laterano, 140 × 208 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

2. 2. Veduta della Piramide di Caio Cestio, 140 × 208 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi sculp.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

3. 3. Veduta del Campidoglio, 142 × 209 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi incise’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

4. 4. Veduta del Tempio della Concordia, 138 × 205 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’, London, British Museum (1923,0612.11.21)

5. 5. Veduta del Tempio di Antonino, oggi Dogana di Terra, 140 × 206 mm (specimen in Quirinale collection signed ‘Laura Piranesi incise’, the one in the British Museum erased, 1923,0612.11.8)

6. 6. Veduta del Tempio di Cibele nella piazza della Bocca della Verità, 132 × 197 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi incise’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

7. 7. Tempio di Giano, 139 × 229 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

8. 8. Veduta del Portico di Ottavia, 99 × 132 mm, attribution to Laura Piranesi, London, British Museum (1922.1113.2)

9. 9. Veduta dell’Arco di Settimio Severo, 130 × 196 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

10. 10. Veduta del Tempio di Bacco oggi detto S. Urbano, 139 × 220 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Istituto centrale per la grafica

11. 11. Veduta degli avanzi del Tempio della Pace, 138 × 207 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Istituto centrale per la grafica

12. 12. Veduta del Ponte Salaro, 144 × 206 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi incise’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

13. 13. Veduta dell’Arco di Tito, 139 × 206 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi inc.’, London, British Museum (1923,0612.11.39)

14. 14. Veduta della Rotonda, 139 × 200 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’ Fine Arts Museums San Francisco, 140 × 230 mm, London, British Museum (1923,0612.11.3)

15. 15. Veduta della Fontana di Termini, 131 × 190 mm, unsigned, London, British Museum (1922,1113.3)

16. 16. Veduta della Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, 141 × 209 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi incise’, Rome, Istituto centrale per la grafica (Figure 8.1)

17. 17. Veduta di Ponte Molle, 140 × 230 mm, British Museum unsigned (1923,0612.11.10), Quirinale signed ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’

18. 18. Veduta dell’Anfiteatro Flavio d.o il Colosseo, 141 × 208 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi sculp.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

19. 19. Veduta del tempio della Sibilla in Tivoli, 131 × 195 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

20. 20. Sepolcro di Cecilia Metella or detto Capo di Bove, 140 × 207 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Istituto centrale per la grafica

21. 21. Veduta del Castello Sant’Angelo, 140 × 200 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi sculp.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

Up to now, Laura’s views have never been analysed as complete and autonomous works. Instead, they have always been treated only in relation to the work of her father and brother and known as sheets inserted in collective works. As noted in the prints, she appears as ‘Laura’ or ‘Lavora’, probably a distortion of her name made by those who added etched titles and texts on the plates, and identifies herself as the etcher. Laura engraved the plates – and invented part of the design or composition – and if we compare the etching technique, we notice many characteristics that unequivocally identify Laura’s style. First of all, the quality of the lines is very different from that of her father. Giovanni Battista’s compositions are magnificent, impeccable, full of details: his etching lines are extremely precise. Those that delineate the architecture are thin and regular. Highly stylized parallel lines and cross hatching produce skillful tonal effects that define and order the space. The slow process of multiple etchings using a mordant of strong vinegar, copper sulphate, and ammonia salts rather than the nitric acid used by his contemporaries, bites sharper lines while repeated acid baths achieve a wide range of tones, from silvery greys to intense and velvety blacks. Conversely, Laura’s etching is very free. Her use of the etching needle to gently expose the metal plate beneath the protective ground to the bite of the acid produces a line that appears as if drawn with a stylus: her lines are soft and sometimes repeated like the pentimenti of a sketch, thereby creating very vivid compositions. Laura does not use a scriber, her scenes are drawn freehand, while her father makes use of various precision tools to draw the architectural reliefs on the metallic surface. Moreover, it seems that she prefers to dip the plate only once into the acid bath; in this way the longer the exposure, the deeper and wider will be the recesses created by the acid. These recesses will retain more or less ink during the printing process, resulting in a greater or lesser presence of blacks in the composition. Unique biting gives the prints a spontaneous and pleasing effect.

Figure 8.1 Laura Piranesi, Veduta della Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, 14.1 × 20.9 cm.

Rome Istituto centrale per la grafica. Courtesy of Ministry of Culture.

We can generally observe a formal balance between blacks and whites in Laura’s compositions, and a skilfully judged amount of etching, such as to make the subtle lines of the perspective backgrounds and the skies very clear, with the close-ups, the shaded areas, and the figures being very dark. Skies are not stormy and clouded as are her father’s; the views are more intimate, and figures, although sketched and elongated in a way very similar to Giovanni Battista’s, never assume the same attitudes and positions inside the scene. It is undoubtedly a studied and sought-after result, which suits perfectly the small format of her views, giving a picturesque effect. The twenty known subjects represent views of ancient and modern Roman monuments, and the views and perspective cuts of the compositions are the same as her father’s, while the atmosphere is pleasantly easy and not solemn. Laura creates views of Roman ruins and monuments as independent images rather than illustrations for books as her father did.

In two cases (Veduta del Tempio di Antonino and Veduta del Ponte Molle), the prints kept in Palazzo del Quirinale seem to have been printed before the British Museum specimens: the former include a signature, whereas it appears to be abraded in the two subjects in the British Museum (for the Ponte Molle see also the BAV; for the Veduta del Tempio di Antonino, see the National Gallery of Art, Washington, both unsigned). Hind records that eighteen of these compositions (the series kept in British Museum) are miniature reproductions of her father’s greatest Vedute Romane, including a new version of the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli. Laura’s etchings are almost always present in collective volumes along with views signed by her father and her brother. The known volumes are uneven in the number of plates (sometimes sixty, sometimes sixty-one, sometimes sixty-two; the album of the Fondo Cicognara in the BAV contains sixty-eight plates). Many of these albums are difficult to trace because when they entered public collections they were disassembled for conservation reasons. When they are located in private collections, we can only register their passage to auction houses for sale. Therefore, in examining Laura’s views contained in different volumes, we can note that the signature on etchings associated with her vary in completeness or absence.Footnote ²⁶

Thus, we have at least two known states of Laura’s prints: a first state where her name is highlighted, a second without the indication of the etcher, or with the sole indication ‘Piranesi’; it can be assumed that these plates were published after the artist’s death under the surname of her famous father. It is not possible to determine the dating of these small views by Laura because they are not dated on the plates, and particularly because they are not traceable among the more than a thousand copperplates of the Piranesi chalcography recovered to Paris by Francesco and purchased by the Calcografia Camerale at the behest of Pope Gregory XVI, thus returning to Rome in 1839.

It’s not disclosed in past biographies if Laura was in possession of and authorised to sell the small views of Rome that she had made and signed with her name when her father was still alive. As just mentioned, it was not possible to trace the small etched plates in the Piranesian corpus managed by the brothers Francesco and Pietro in Paris, and then returned to the Calcografia Camerale in Rome, now preserved at Istituto centrale per la grafica, nor is there any trace of the prints by Laura in sales catalogues of Roman contemporary publishers.Footnote ²⁷ In 1998 and 2001, two watercolour drawings depicting the pinwheel of fireworks in Castel Sant’Angelo were auctioned. Both drawings bore the inscription ‘Laura Piranesi f.’ One of the two was titled Veduta del Ponte e del Castello S. Angelo nel tempo che si spara la Girandola, the other Veduta del Castel S. Angelo di Roma, in tempo che spara la Girandola. Both drawings can be compared to the same subject etched with aquatint by Francesco Piranesi based on a drawing by the French painter Louis Jean Desprez. On 26 January 1781, Francesco Piranesi and Desprez set up a company for the production of watercolour and etched views. Several subjects are specifically mentioned in the agreement: the Pope’s Adoration of Holy Sacrament in Paolina Chapel in Vatican, the Illumination of the Cross on Good Friday in St. Peter’s, the pinwheel of Castel Sant’Angelo, the temple of Isis in Pompei, the Posillipo grotta, and the temple of Serapis, Pozzuoli.Footnote ²⁸ The plates were originally etched by Francesco in outline, and were intended as a basis for Desprez to watercolour. After Desprez’s departure from Italy in 1784, Piranesi reworked the plates with etching and aquatint, in order to print them without them needing to be coloured. Chracas’s Diario ordinario di Roma in 1782 records: ‘Francesco Piranesi pubblica tre stampe di statue antiche e alcune vedute di Roma e Napoli colorate (fatte con il mons. Despres). Offerte al Pontefice’. ‘Francesco Piranesi publishes three prints of ancient statues and some coloured views of Rome and Naples (done with Mons. Despres). Offered to the Pope’.Footnote ²⁹ The British Museum houses a watercolour drawing depicting the cave of Posillipo attributed to Desprez,Footnote ³⁰ recognised by Campbell Dogson (curator of the museum’s Prints and Drawings department from 1912 to 1932) as preparatory for the etching made by Francesco Piranesi and retouched by hand by Desprez; it is one of the prints mentioned in the contract between the two artists. Assuming that the two signed drawings were made by Laura before her father’s death, it is interesting to note that the pinwheel of Castel Sant’Angelo, an evidently very popular and publicly requested subject, was designed and perhaps also coloured by Laura Piranesi, probably for an editorial project later carried on by her brother Francesco.

The presence of the prints signed by Laura, or with her surname only, both in miscellaneous volumes printed in Rome in 1802 and as images in a journal edited in Paris a few years later, does not dispel the doubt about what happened to the plates. This is an issue that still needs to be investigated and that promises to open up new lines of research towards a better understanding of the life and work of this neglected female artist.

Through documents newly discovered in the archives, we now know that Laura Piranesi died on 9 March 1790 at 34 years of age.Footnote ³¹ This premature death left her promising talent largely untapped. Despite her short life, Laura Piranesi’s etchings reveal her precise, pure, and elegant touch. Her style, characterised by both a fluid line and the accuracy of technique, is in keeping with her free interpretation of the view genre in tune with the proto-Romantic current of Italian landscape painters. While many questions about her career and production remain unanswered, continued archival research may uncover new prints or documents about her work and its reception. Talent and skill evident in her etchings suggest that, had she lived longer, she might well have moved beyond following in her father’s footsteps to create a path of her own.

A manuscript list of ‘Works of Genius at Strawberryhill [sic] by Persons of rank and Gentlemen, not Artists’ was compiled by the famous collector Horace Walpole (1717–1797), Lord Orford, and inserted into his own heavily annotated copy of A Description of the Villa at Strawberry Hill (1774).Footnote ¹ Among the fourteen items created by these non-professional artists Walpole lists an album of prints by both women and men that he described as ‘A Volume of Engravings by various persons of quality’.Footnote ² Later, the volume was officially included in the Description as part of an Appendix to subsequent printings (1781). In this category of ‘non-professional’ makers, Walpole especially singled out works of ‘female genius’ by close friends and family including Lady Diana Beauclerk, Anne Damer, and Mary Berry, among others.Footnote ³ The collecting activities and writings of Horace Walpole provide one of the most enthusiastic voices for the appreciation of non-professional artists – women in particular – framed at once in distinction and in complement to professionals. As such, Walpole’s ‘A Volume of Engravings by various persons of quality’ will be a principal source for the present account of women etchers.

Bifurcations of art and commerce framed both opportunities and constraints for all who practiced the arts in eighteenth-century England. Makers – women as well as men – were commonly divided by social and economic dictates between those who were professional artists and those who were ‘not artists’. As non-professional artists later came to be known as ‘amateurs’ and their work accordingly associated with lesser quality, learning, and ambition, they have been largely excluded from serious inquiry in the discipline of art history and their legacies have suffered. While many scholars, including myself, continue to use the term ‘amateur’, this chapter prioritises the designation ‘not artist’ or ‘non-professional’ in recognition of the powerful cultural currency it connoted about essential matters of class identity and social prescriptions: ladies and gentlemen of rank and quality should not engage in labour, especially for remuneration, as professionals did. While questions of quality for these practitioners resided as much in the person as in the prints they produced, the status ‘not artist’ also substantially determined how these women could and could not engage as printmakers.

As many chapters in this volume demonstrate, women who sought their livelihood in the thriving commercial market for prints as printmakers, printsellers, or print publishers, either independently or as part of a family business, did so against disadvantages of the legal and social constraints imposed on their gender. Conversely, when women of high social status and wealth engaged in printmaking, they did so within non-professional arenas but with the advantages of leisure and access provided by their privilege.Footnote ⁴ While class-based mandates compelled them to operate in spaces apart from the rules of trade and profession, women etchers shared greater parity with their male counterparts who were equally compelled to distance themselves from commerce.Footnote ⁵ Because they operated outside the mechanisms of business and trade, little trace of etchings by non-professionals exists in contemporary trade catalogues, newspaper advertisements, or legal records where documentation of professional printmaking activity can often be found. Nevertheless, surviving etchings by these women, ‘not artists’, provide a key source of evidence for their printmaking.

An even fuller story is preserved in contemporary albums that were created by family and friends from their own social circles. When in 1930 the British Museum acquired two volumes of approximately 150 etchings by ‘amateurs’ compiled by the collector and prolific extra-illustrator Richard Bull (1721–1805), Clare Stuart Wortley described the collection in an essay titled ‘Amateur Etchers’:Footnote ⁶

Under the putative affection of idyllic nostalgia, this description largely casts a pejorative, early twentieth century judgement on the merit of this non-professional printmaking practice as amateur.

The ambition and skill of Lady Louisa Augusta Greville’s landscape etching after a painting by Salvator Rosa, however, belie the belittling assessment (Figure 9.1). Large in scale (36.4 × 47.5 mm, trimmed), her ambitious print exhibits a sophisticated knowledge of the seventeenth-century old master artist who was much in vogue among British aristocrat collectors and academic painters. In addition to affirming Lady Greville’s taste and her privileged access to canonical old masters, her work displays a skilful line and a technique that is adeptly executed. Her print demonstrates a clear understanding of aerial perspective, with a varied technique used to create a darker, perhaps more deeply bitten, line in the repoussoir of decayed trees so characteristic of Rosa’s work against a fainter more delicately etched line that effectively renders distance.

Figure 9.1 Lady Louisa Augusta Greville, Landscape after a Painting by Salvator Rosa.

Etching, 36.4 × 47.5 cm (trimmed to the plate) in Horace Walpole’s A Collection of Prints Engraved by Various Persons of Quality. Courtesy of Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

How do we reconcile historically dismissive judgements against evidence of considerable productivity and accomplishment and then reintegrate the work of non-professional women etchers into the larger history of women and printmaking? This chapter will explore this question through an account of the printmaking practices of Isabella Byron, Lady Carlisle; Lady Louisa Augusta Greville; and the cousins Miss Amabel Yorke, later Lady Polwarth, and her younger cousin Miss Caroline Yorke, alongside the circulation and reception of their etchings among noble collectors.

‘Not Artists’

In 1983, David Alexander’s exhibition Amateurs and Printmaking in England 1750–1850 introduced a corrective, more nuanced approach to these artists, explaining that:

While Alexander does not distance himself entirely from the connoisseur’s inclination to judge the quality of the etchings in question in terms of professional measures, his astute redefinition of ‘amateurs’ is a useful starting point.

First, the term ‘amateur’ must be qualified as a convenient anachronism and its usage historically contextualised. Two groundbreaking books by Kim Sloan and Ann Bermingham, both published in 2000, largely dedicated to drawing, firmly reinstated the subject of non-professional art as worthy of serious scholarly enquiry.Footnote ⁹ Sloan acknowledges the problematic nature of ‘amateur’ to describe drawing by non-professional artists during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the category was then still evolving. ‘Amateurs’, she explains, ‘were [first] lovers of the arts, the word taken from the French where the root was the Latin word amare, to love’. In England, it was not until around 1780 that amateur ‘came to mean not only someone who loved and understood, but who also practiced the arts, without regard for pecuniary advantage’.Footnote ¹⁰ In her essay on amateurs and etching in eighteenth century France, Charlotte Guillard argues that ‘the figure of the amateur should not be reduced to that of a dilettante or collector, a confusion too often perpetuated in art history’ and which has led to the artists and their creations to be accorded little value even as they occupied a central place in artistic spheres.Footnote ¹¹

As a shift in terminology can facilitate fresh perspectives, the label ‘amateur’ with its anachronistic pejorative bias will thus be eschewed in the present study with a view to more fully considering the contributions of women to print culture that this volume undertakes. Building on important work begun in the 1980s by prominent scholars of British printmaking, among them David Alexander, Ellen D’Oench, Richard Godfrey, and Christopher White, and leaning on the later magisterial work of Sloan, the following pages unfold a history of etchings by ladies ‘not artists’ and begin to reintegrate their activities into the wider cultural economy of printmaking and circulation in eighteenth-century England.Footnote ¹²

‘The Albums’

In her discussion of Richard Bull’s albums, Wortley observed that a contemporary set of etchings provides a fortunate opportunity to assess collective activity because ‘bringing them together forms something of a guide to the subject and enables us to review it as a whole’.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, Walpole’s Collection of Engravings by Various Persons of Rank and Quality together with Richard Bull’s Etching and Engravings, by the Nobility and Gentry of England; or by Persons not Exercising the Art as a Trade provide evidence for the production, circulation, and collecting history of prints by non-professional women. This is especially true because Walpole and Bull knew each other well. They exchanged prints in a friendly, cooperative manner, if sometimes also competitively. Both albums together allow us to consider intersections of social commerce between the two like-minded collectors. Ancillary evidence in correspondence between Bull and Walpole and with the etchers, and manuscript notes in the albums enhance our understanding of the pursuits of ladies who etched and the connections of their activities to printmaking and collecting more generally.

With all due posture of leisure and negligence befitting a noble gentleman, Horace Walpole wrote to his friend William Mason describing a collection of prints he was himself assembling:

This short passage is a pithy credo of Walpole’s engagement in political debate about the contested social and class spaces of art making, collecting, and virtuosity with nothing less at stake than defining the proper character of the nation’s art and patronage.Footnote ¹⁵ As British artists worked to establish professional status with the establishment of an academy, British aristocrats, uncomfortable with the encroachment of commerce into aesthetics, pushed back with a counter economy of image production, circulation, and collecting that insulated itself from trade. In this debate, Walpole’s characterisation of his bookmaking as ‘harmless’ and without ‘disgrace’ asserts his own gentlemanly status unencumbered by work. He loves to employ time – but not to labour.

Walpole’s insistence that he does not value money underscores that he finds value outside of monied concerns, as did the makers of the etchings within the album. The bespoke title page for A Collection of Prints, Engraved by Various Persons of Quality, printed at his own private press at Strawberry Hill, makes a forthright declaration. A small view of Strawberry Hill beneath, situates the collection in a private domestic space. The full title page of Richard Bull’s album even more explicitly rejects commerce: ‘ETCHINGS and ENGRAVINGS, by the Nobility and Gentry of ENGLAND: or, By PERSONS not exercising the Art as a TRADE’.Footnote ¹⁶ Notably, ‘persons of rank’ or ‘nobility and gentry’ encompass women as well as men. In this shared space, women and their male counterparts participated with parity in a common project of production and circulation based in their status. One even wonders if Walpole’s interchangeable use of the term ‘engraving’ for his album title while he uses ‘etching’ in his epistolary description simply evokes engraving in its broadest usage for all intaglio processes, or whether he more strategically blurred hierarchies of printing techniques to claim greater stature for this collection of etchings by non-professionals. Line engraving more narrowly a technique for cutting copperplates with a burin following a highly stylised linear system requires the considerable skill and training of professional printmakers. As such it is associated with the highest form of printmaking including reproductions of important academic painting.Footnote ¹⁷ On the other hand, etching, which uses a needle essentially as a drawing instrument, is more in keeping with the non-professional practice which is the focus of Walpole’s collection of prints by persons of rank and quality.

Isabella Byron, Later Lady Carlisle (1721–1795)

Whether by intention or accident, prints by women hold primacy of place appearing at the front of Walpole’s first album. In Bull’s album they are gathered in the second volume. In addition to the main title page for his collection, Walpole printed section title pages for the first three individual printmakers among the many in his collection. Two of these were women: Isabella Byron Lady Carlisle and Lady Louisa Augusta Greville. The third was Simon Harcourt, Viscount Nuneham the only male printmaker with a separate title page. It is unclear whether Walpole deemed these artists particularly worthy of a bespoke title page, or if he simply abandoned the effort thereafter. In any case, the etchings of these three are among the most striking. Each title page asserts the maker’s bona fides of familial lineage – patrimony and marriage – to affirm their status as a person of quality.

The first section title page reads: ‘Etchings by Isabella Byron, Daughter of William Lord Byron, and Second Wife of Henry Howard, Fourth Earl of Howard’. In 1759, Isabella Byron married Richard Musgrave, Bt of Hayton Castle, Co Cumberland, a noted print collector. On the rectos of the following seven album leaves are pasted thirteen etchings by Byron after or in the style of old masters. Despite her focus on drawing, Sloan has nevertheless given a brief account of Isabella Byron’s printmaking, if only in entries about the work of her younger brother The Hon. Revd Richard Byron (1724–1811) who was also a prolific etcher.Footnote ¹⁸ With her focus on prints, D’Oench duly recognises The Hon. Isabella Byron’s achievement independent of her male family members, with a separate entry as one of only two women printmakers who worked as Rembrandt copyists and imitators.Footnote ¹⁹ Benefiting from her father’s position at court, Isabella Byron likely learned to paint and etch, as did her brother, from the drawing master Joseph Goupy (1689–1769) who had several royal pupils. She would have copied a range of old master prints and learned to compose herself. Lady Carlisle probably produced most of her etchings in the mid-1750s, after her first marriage to Henry Howard, fourth earl of Carlisle in 1743 and before her second marriage to Musgrave in 1759. The latest dated print is 1760.Footnote ²⁰ She signed her prints in the plate as either Isabella Carlisle or Isabella Carlisle – aqua fortis, or simply IC. Among her several etchings in the Walpole volume after Rembrandt are her copy in reverse of Cottage beside a Canal, c. 1645 (Hind 212; B228) which is signed ‘Isabela [sic] Carlisle Fecit’ and her copy of Rembrandt’s Man in a Fur Cap (B151). Both prints can also be found in Richard Bull’s Album along with others of her prints owned by both collectors.Footnote ²¹

By mid-century, drawings and prints by Rembrandt were avidly collected in ‘a madness to have his prints’, thus it is not surprising that his prints were among the most widely imitated images for professional and noble printmakers alike.Footnote ²² In a letter to W. S. Lewis identifying sources for the etching copies in Walpole’s album, A. Hyatt Mayer, Curator at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, observed that the list of etchings after old master paintings ‘makes a kind of index of well-informed taste in the eighteenth century’.Footnote ²³ By making such copies noble printmakers actively engaged in this ‘madness’ and certainly benefited from privileged access to Rembrandt’s art in the collections of family and friends or through the mediation of printed copies or drawings by others or by drawing masters. Walpole’s albums not surprisingly include etchings after Rembrandt by others, both men and women. The etchings copied after, or inspired by, Rembrandt include many prints by several others among Walpole’s noble engravers: a detail in reverse of Rembrandt and his Wife Saskia, Man in a Fur Hat, The Rat Catcher, The Hog, as well as several landscape, peasant and beggar subjects.

Byron made copies too after or in the style of other collectable European old masters. Both Walpole’s and Bull’s albums and single sheet prints include prints after Simone Cantarini and Wenceslaus Hollar. Impressions of her copy of St. Thais of Egypt after Parmegiano, signed and dated in the plate 1758 in Walpole’s album and as a single sheet in the British Museum share virtually the same annotation in the same hand: ‘This figure from Parmegiano much unfinished In the Original’.Footnote ²⁴ Was this hand that of Lady Carlisle herself or of another individual in the circulation of these prints? Did she annotate these and distribute them as gifts?

We know from his correspondence with Horace Mann, that Walpole and Carlisle were acquaintances. Walpole was quite aware of the reception of her works and her knowledge of the arts. Writing to Walpole about her arrival in Florence, Mann refers to her as ‘your very ingenious friend Lady Carlisle’ and reports further that ‘she speaks with great friendship for you’.Footnote ²⁵ Mann reports on another occasion that Lady Carlisle ‘spoke so much of you and showed us so many of her own works and much practice in pictures, that she was thought very clever in those points here, and gained at the Gallery the reputation of a connaisseuse’.Footnote ²⁶ In his 1759 manuscript ‘Book of Materials’, Walpole notes among comments on other noble artists that ‘Isabella, sister of lord Byron, and widow of the Earl of Carlisle, and remarried to Sr William Musgrave, paints flowers in water-colours very neatly, and etches after drawings’.Footnote ²⁷

Lady Louisa Augusta Greville (1743–1779)

The second section of Walpole’s album is given to the prints of Lady Greville. The bespoke title page again gives her bona fides: ‘Etchings by Lady Louisa Greville, Eldest Daughter of Francis Earl of Brooke and Warwick.’ Like Isabella Byron, Lady Greville’s family had contacts with the court, and she likely had lessons from landscape artists Paul Sandby and Alexander Cozens. As with Lady Carlisle, Lady Greville’s prints are closely connected with her male relatives, and details of her training and work are noted by Sloan in her entry on a drawing by her brother George Greville, 2nd Earl of Warwick.Footnote ²⁸ After providing her lineage, Walpole wrote of Lady Louisa Greville that she ‘draws landscape finely, & was presented with a medal by the Society of arts and sciences’. He notes further that ‘she etches in very great style & taste’.Footnote ²⁹

Walpole’s album includes four of her prints, all relatively large and ambitious plates after canonical seventeenth-century European old masters. The first three are after drawings: a landscape with holy family and cowherds after a drawing by Carracci (signed in the plate ‘A. Carracci. del / A.G. fecit. 1760’); a landscape with a sedan chair carried by donkeys after Salvator Rosa (signed in the plate ‘Salvator Rosa delin. / AG sculpt. 1759’); a scene with five figures (signed ‘Guercino delint / AG fecit 1760’). The fourth is after the landscape painting by Rosa that is mentioned at the beginning of this chapter (signed in the plate ‘Rosa pinxt / AG delint’ 1761 et sculpt 1762’) (Figure 9.1). Presumably, she had access to the original painting by Rosa as well as works by other old masters she also copied. Greville’s etchings are also present in Bull’s album and in a set of prints and drawings by George Earl of Warwick, who produced classicising landscapes in watercolours, and by Lady Louisa Greville.Footnote ³⁰ The models for Greville’s etchings are all artists at the top of the academic canon. In his lectures as President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds points to Rosa, Guercino, and Carracci among other old masters as models to be emulated for an aspiring painter. Walpole himself, in contest with Academy doctrine, asserts in hyperbolic praise that the drawings for his play The Mysterious Mother by Lady Diana Beauclerk, whom he counted as a ‘female genius’, were such ‘that Salvator Rosa and Guido could not surpass their expression and beauty’.Footnote ³¹ With her etched copies, Lady Greville likewise engaged with canonical art.

The proximity of old masters esteemed by the academy with works by non-professional persons of quality likewise coexisted in broader economy of collecting practices. For both Walpole and Bull, the collecting of non-professional etchers overlapped with other shared collecting pursuits. Bull and Walpole were both committed to collecting British portrait prints and tracked each other’s progress.Footnote ³² Each pursued a comprehensive collection of prints catalogued in James Granger’s A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution; Consisting of Characters Disposed in Different Classes, and Adapted to a Methodical Catalogue of Engraved British Heads (London, 1769). In a lengthy footnote to the entry on John Evelyn in ‘Class X. Artists, etc.’, Granger enumerates ‘several persons of rank and eminence, now living, who amuse themselves with etching and engraving’. Pointedly, Granger begins this passage with Lady Louisa Greville, commenting that she has ‘etched several landscapes that well deserve a place in any collection’.Footnote ³³ Both Walpole and Bull also engaged in the common practice of extra-illustrated folios including that of Horace Walpole’s own A Description of a Villa at Strawberry Hill using common watercolour and print images.Footnote ³⁴

Lady Caroline Yorke (1765–1818) and Amabel Yorke, Lady Polwarth (1751–1833)

Etchings by Caroline Yorke and her older cousin Amabel Yorke, later Lady Polwarth, were as collectable as prints by Carlisle and Greville. Though Walpole gave neither a bespoke letterpress title page, etchings by both were included in his and in Bull’s collections. Both qualified with an appropriate quality lineage. Amabel Yorke succeeded her mother as Baroness Lucas of Crudwell, 1797. In 1772 she married Alexander Hume-Campbell, styled Viscount Polwarth. She was created Countess De Grey of Wrest in 1816.Footnote ³⁵ Lady Caroline Yorke married in 1790 to John Eliot, 2nd Baron Eliot. Unlike the practices of Lady Carlisle and Lady Greville that relied on the old masters for their copies, the practices of Caroline and Amabel Yorke divergently found imagery in contemporary models, including their own designs or those of their family.Footnote ³⁶

Caroline Yorke’s small-scale etchings are relatively modest. Four oval scenes in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight are pasted on one page of Walpole’s album where the prints are described in his hand as ‘by Miss Yorke, daughter of Charles Yorke, 2d Son of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, & of Miss Johnson, Mr. Yorke’s second Wife who drew the Views’. Signed in the plate with initials ‘A.Y. del’ and ‘C.Y. sculpt.’, these compositions were copied after drawings by her mother Agneta Yorke. Two are numbered and dated 1787–1788.Footnote ³⁷ Based on insider knowledge, Walpole annotated locations for some of these views. Additional prints by her appear two pages later: View on Beaulieu River with title in the plate, also after Agneta Yorke, and a wooded landscape after W. Gilpin.

Historical evidence about how and where non-professionals learned to etch or where they had their prints etched and printed is limited. Alexander, however, points to manuals such as those by John Evelyn or William Gilpin that gave written instruction on etching and speculates that many were likely inspired to try their hand.Footnote ³⁸ Sloan more thoroughly outlines the influence of both William Gilpin and Alexander Cozens on the landscape drawings by various women in the extended Yorke family.Footnote ³⁹ Agneta Yorke had some acquaintance with William Gilpin, and Caroline Yorke’s etching of a wooded scene after a drawing by W. Gilpin confirms her study of his work. More, her etchings after Agneta Yorke generally recall the oval vignette illustrations in Gilpin’s book.

Amabel Yorke also made etchings variously after her own drawings or those by drawing masters or family members. Based on the drawings themselves and on epistolary testimony in various archives of family correspondence, Sloan records that Lady Polwarth, her mother the Marchioness Grey and her sister, Lady Mary Grantham all closely followed the methods of Alexander Cozens for composing landscapes, including sketching out of doors. After her marriage in 1772, Amabel made etchings after drawings by Cozens.Footnote ⁴⁰ Lady Polwarth’s etchings in Walpole’s album of scenes near Aranjuez after drawings by her sister’s husband Lord Grantham (Thomas Robinson, 2nd Baron Grantham) are scattered in Walpole’s album. Her oval landscape View in Studley Park is after her own drawing and is signed ‘Ldy A. P del. Et sc’.Footnote ⁴¹ The landscapes are nicely composed, and the etching techniques are well executed, even if the delineation of figures can be awkward. Amabel’s larger, more ambitious etchings perhaps reflect her association with James Bretherton (fl. 1750–1799) from whom she took lessons. Bretherton was a drawing master and printer who made prints after old masters, and who also etched and published prints for gentleman artists, most notably Henry William Bunbury whose work however did circulate in the trade.Footnote ⁴² Amabel Yorke’s diary records repeated visits to Bretherton’s shop and her work with him drawing and etching.Footnote ⁴³

Even though her plates were likely printed on the press of a professional printmaker/publisher, they were private printings. None of Yorke’s etchings, nor those by Lady Carlisle and Lady Greville, include any publication imprint in keeping with their circulation outside of trade.Footnote ⁴⁴ In fact we know that the etchings by both Amabel and Caroline Yorke were instead exchanged as gifts of friendship and social currency among elites.Footnote ⁴⁵ One instance of such gifting is documented by a letter from Walpole sent in thanks to Bull for ‘the last prints you was [sic] so kind as to send me, and for those I found today on my return from Strawberry Hill’. These prints which Walpole describes as ‘truly very meritorious’ are four views of scenery in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight now in Walpole’s A Collection of Prints, Engraved by Various Persons of Quality. Although her diaries mention repeated visits to Strawberry Hill, it is unclear how close her acquaintance to Walpole really was. Certainly, his knowledge of her was sufficient for him to register disapproval of her behaviour.Footnote ⁴⁶ Nevertheless, closing the circle of politeness, Walpole inquires with Bull about where she lives so that he may leave his name and grateful thanks at her door.Footnote ⁴⁷ Bull’s involvement with Amabel Yorke’s printmaking and collecting apparently extended to loaning her his ‘Volumes of Honorary Etchings’. With her letter of appreciation, she also presented him with some etchings by other Ladies.Footnote ⁴⁸

Conclusion

Often considered separate from canonical work produced by professional artists, the etchings by Lady Carlisle, Lady Greville and Lady Caroline Yorke and Lady Polwarth together with their reception by two prominent contemporary collectors demonstrate that the practice of etching by ladies, ‘not artists’ was, in fact, at once both distinct and connected to the print trade. Self-consciously produced and circulated privately these prints were, however, disseminated, if only among fashionable circles as gifts of friendship, acts of connoisseurship, and as artifacts prized by collectors. If the creation of these etchings was ideologically antithetical to the professional practice of most of the other women included in this volume, the work of these non-professional printmakers, its cultural and social currency, and its reception among contemporaries nonetheless represent a vital component of the story of women printmakers in eighteenth century Britain.

Indeed, prints, especially those copied from or inspired by master artists by women (equally with men) who were ‘not artists’, herald a privileged access to canonical works while also affirming their aesthetic judgement and status as the proper audience and patrons for the arts in England. As such, Walpole fittingly shelved A Collection of Prints, Engraved by Various Persons of Quality in the Round Drawing Room together with portfolios of prints and drawings by European artists like Rembrandt, Annibale Carraci, Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa, as well as Paul Sandby, and many others.Footnote ⁴⁹ The title of Edward Millinton’s auction catalogue A Curious collection of Prints and Drawings, by the best engravers and Greatest Masters in the World. Fit only for Persons of Quality and Gentlemen, which are the Virtuosos of the Age (1690) attests to a long-standing notion that persons of quality were best fit as arbiters of art. It is in this cultural milieu that women, ‘not artists’, made etchings that engaged so fully with collecting and old master works. In this way, their activities as printmakers in eighteenth-century Britain were integral to the wider world of print culture, and the art world more broadly. As such we can rightly reinsert their significant legacy individually and collectively on the imprint of women in graphic media.