Bibliography

Romantic Illustration Network:
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If you have any suggestions for texts we should include, or would like us to add your book or article, please email
Katie Snow at ks596@exeter.ac.uk

Allen, Graham. ‘Shelley as Visual Artist: Doodles, Sketches, Ink Blots, and the Critical Reception of the Visual.’  Studies in Romanticism, 60 no. 3, 2021: 277-306.

Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Harvard UP, 1978.

Altick, Richard D. Painting from Books: Art and Literature in Britain 1760-1900. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985.

Baker, James. The Business of Satirical Prints in Late-Georgian England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Bartram, Alan. Five Hundred Years of Book Design. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Benton, Michael. Studies in the spectator role: Literature, painting and pedagogy. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Bettley, James, ed. The Art of the Book: From Medieval Manuscript to Graphic Novel. London: V and A Publications, 2001.

Bland, David. The Illustration of Books. Faber and Faber, 1951.

Bland, David. A History of Book Illustration: The Illuminated Manuscript and the Printed Book. Second Edition. Faber and Faber, 1969.

Blewett, David. The Illustration of Robinson Crusoe, 1719-1920. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995.

Bonnell, Thomas Frank. The Most Disreputable Trade: publishing the classics of English poetry 1765-1810. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Brenni, Vito Joseph. Book Illustration and Decoration: A Guide to Research. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Breton, Rob. “Portraits of the Poor in Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Journalism,” Journal of Victorian Culture 21:2 (2016), 168-83.

Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. 1997; Routledge, 2013. Chapter 11, ‘Borrowing, Copying and Collecting’.

Briggs, Jo. Novelty Fair: British visual culture between Chartism and the Great Exhibition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

Brown, John Buchanan. Early Victorian Illustrated Books: Britain, France and Germany 1820-1860. London: British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2005.

Bryan, Michael. Dictionary of Painters and Engravers: Biographical and Critical. New ed., rev. and enl., ed. Robert Edmund Graves. London: G. Bell, 1886-1889.

Brylowe, Thora. Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Bryson, Norman et al, eds. Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Burwick, Frederick. “James Gillray and the Aporia of Visual Hermeneutics,” Romantic Explorations, ed. Michael Meyer. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011. Pp. 85-103.

Burwick, Frederick.“The Hermeneutics of Lichtenberg’s Interpretation of Hogarth,” The Lessing Yearbook 19 (1987): 167‑191.

Burwick, Frederick. “Lessing’s Laokoon and the rise of Visual Hermeneutics,” Poetics Today XX, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 219-272.

Cale, Luisa. Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning readers into spectators’. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.

Clayton, Timothy. ‘The London Printsellers and the Export of English Graphic Prints” in Kremers, Anorthe and Reich, Elisabeth. (eds.) Loyal Subversion? Caricatures from the Personal Union between England and Hanover (1714-1837). Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Reprecht, 2014. Pp. 140-62.

Cubitt, Sean. Digital Aesthetics. Sage, 1998 [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita/index.html]

Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987.

Daly, Peter M. et al eds. Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts. Germany: Universitatsbund Erlangen-Nurnberg, 1988.

Davidson, Peter. The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth Century Biography. New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 1992.

Delamaire, Marie-Stéphanie and Slauter, Will. (eds.) Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021.

Dias, Rosemarie. ‘“A World of Pictures”: Pall Mall and the Topography of Display, 1780-1799’ in Miles Ogborn and Charles Withers, Georgian Geographies: Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century.’ Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Dickie, Simon. Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Duff, David. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Eaves, Morris. ‘The sister arts in British Romanticism’. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Second Edition Ed. Stuart Curran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 229-61.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Essick, Robert N. “Visual/Verbal Relationships in Book Illustration.” In British Art 1740-1820: Essays in Honor of Robert R. Wark. Ed Guilland Sutherland. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1992.

Faxon, Frederick W. Literary Annual and Gift Books: A Bibliography. Private Libraries Association, 1973.

Ferguson, Olivia. “Walter Scott and the Future of Caricature in the Novel,” Studies in Romanticism, 60 no. 2, 2021: 205-227.

Ferris, Ina, and Paul Keen, eds. Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700-1900. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2009.

Finkelstein, David Book History Reader. London: Routledge, 2002.

Ford, Brian J. Images of Science: A History of Scientific Illustration. London: British Library, 1992; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: California University Press, 1980.

Garside, Peter. ‘Illustrating the Waverley Novels: Scott, Scotland, and the London Print Trade, 1819-1836’, The Library, 11 (2010), 168-96.

—. ‘Print Illustrations and the Cultural Materialism of Scott’s Waverley Novels’ in British Literature and Print Culture, ed. Sandro Jung. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013. Pp. 125-57.

Gatrell, Vic. City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London. London: Atlantic, 2006.

Gerard, William Blake. Lawrence Sterne and the Visual Imagination. Farnham: Ashgate, 2006.

Golden, Catherine J. Book Illustrated: Text, Image, and Culture 1770-1930. New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2000.

Godfrey, Richard T. and Hallett, Mark. (eds.) James Gillray: The Art of Caricature. London: Tate Publishing, 2001.

Goldman, Paul. ‘Defining Illustration Studies: Towards a New Academic Discipline’, Chapter 1 of Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke, eds, Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855-1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

Gollapudi, Aparna. ‘Selling Celebrity: Actors’ Portraits in Bell’s Shakespeare and Bell’s British Theatre’. Eighteenth Century Life, Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2012.

Gordon, Catherine M. British Painting of Subjects from the English Novel New York: Garland, 1988.

Haggarty, Sarah. ‘Blake’s Newton, Line-Drawing, and Geometry.’ Studies in Romanticism, 60 no. 2, 2021: 123-151.

Hammelmann, Hanns. Book Illustrators in Eighteenth-Century England. Edited and completed by T.S.R. Boase. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975.

Harris, Katherine D. “Fantasies of Containment: Archiving Moments in Cyber- and Real-Life.” Metaphors of Cyberspace. Ed. Caroline Maun.

Harthan, John. The History of the Illustrated Book: The Western Tradition. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981.

Haywood, Ian. Romanticism and Caricature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

—. ‘Pandemonium: Radical Soundscapes and Satirical Prints in the Romantic period’, Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts, 5, 2 (2016). 

—. “The Life of William Cobbett: caricature, hauntology and the impossibility of radical life writing in the Romantic Period” in A History of British Working-Class Literature. Goodridge, J. & Keegan, B. (eds.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 176-194.

—. ‘Hazlitt and the Monarchy: Legitimacy, Radical Print Culture, and Caricature’, The Hazlitt Review 9 (2016), 5-26.

Hazlitt, William. Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England. London: Taylor and Hessey,1824.

Heffernen, James A. W. ed., Space, Time, Image, Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts. Bern:Peter Lang, 1987.

Hill, Richard. ‘The Illustration of the Waverley Novels: Scott and Popular Illustrated Fiction’, Scottish Literary Review, 1.1 (2009), 69-88.

Hill, Richard. Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

Hillis Miller, J. Illustration. London: Reaktion Books, 1992.

Hodnett, Edward. Image and Text: Studies in the Illustration of English Literature. London: Scolar Press, 1982.

—. Five Centuries of English Book Illustration. London: Scolar Press, 1988.

Hofer, Philip. Eighteenth Century Book Illustration. Los Angeles: Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1956.

Höltgen, Karl Josef, Peter M. Daly and Wolfgang Lottes, eds. Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts. Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1988.

Hunnisett, Basil. Steel Engraved Book Illustration in England. London: Scolar Press, 1980.

Ionescu, Christina and Renata Schellenberg eds. Word and Image in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

James, Philip. English bookillustration 1800-1900. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1947.

John, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago UP, 1998.

Jung, Sandro. ‘Illustrated Pocket Diaries and the Commodification of Culture’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 37.3 (2013): 53-84.

Jung, Sandro. ‘Packaging, Design and Colour: From Fine-Printed to Small-Format Editions of Thomson’s The Seasons, 1793-1802’ in Sandro Jung, ed, British Literature and Print Culture, The English Association Essays and Studies 66 (D. S. Brewer, 2013), 97-124.

Jung, Sandro. ‘Print Culture, High-Cultural Consumption, and Thomson’s The Seasons, 1780-1797′, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44 (2011): 495-514.

Jung, Sandro. ‘Thomas Stothard’s Illustrations for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, 1779-1826′, The Library, 12.1 (2011): 3-22.

Jung, Sandro. ‘Visual Interpretations, Print, and Illustrations of Thomson’s The Seasons, 1730–1797’, Eighteenth Century Life 34. 2 (Spring 2010), 23-64.

Katz, Bill, ed. A History of Book Illustration: 29 Points of View. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1994.

Keymer, Thomas and Peter Sabor. Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2006. See especially chapter 5, “Illustrations and the Visual Culture of the Novel”.

Kremers, Anorthe and Reich, Elisabeth. (eds.) Loyal Subversion? Caricatures from the Personal Union between England and Hanover (1714-1837). Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Reprecht, 2014.

Kress, Gunter, amd Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, 1996.

Kroeber, Karl and William Walling. Images of Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.

Landseer, John. Lectures on the Art of Engraving. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme,1807.

Levarie, Norma. The Art and History of Books. New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 1995.

Lewine, J. Bibliography of Eighteenth-Century Art and Illustrated Books: Being a Guide to Collections of Illustrated Works in English and French of the Period. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1898.

Matthews, Susan, Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Maxwell, Richard. The Victorian Illustrated Book. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 2002.

McCreery, Cindy. The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England. London: Clarendon Press, 2004.

Melville, Stephen W. (ed). Vision and Textuality. London: Macmillan, 1991.

Miller, John. Religion in Popular Prints, 1600-1832. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986.

Mitchell, W. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987.

Mole, Tom. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture: 1750-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Möller, Joachim (ed.). Imagination on a Long Rein: English Literature Illustrated. Marburg: Jonas, 1988.

Moores, John Richard. Representations of France in English Satirical Prints 1740-1832. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Myrone, Martin, and Lucy Peltz, ed. Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice, 1700-1850. Preface by Stephen Bann. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999.

Odumosu, Temi. Africans in English Caricature: Black Jokes, White Caricature 1769- 1819. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2017.

O’Rourke, Stephanie.  Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: the making of the bibliographic imagination in the Romantic Period. Chicago, 2009.

Piper, David. The Image of the Poet. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

Pop, Andrei. Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Praz, Mario. Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970.

Quinsey, Katherine M. (ed.) Animals and Human: sensibility and representation, 1650-1820. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017.

Rabb, Melinda. ‘Johnson, Lilliput and Eighteenth-Century Miniature’, Eighteenth Century Studies 46. 2 (2013)

Raven, James. Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Raven, James. The Business of Books 1450-1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Ray, Gordon N. The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790-1914. Pierpont Morgan Library: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Read, Dennis M. R. H. Cromek: Engraver, Editor and Entrepreneur. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Roberto, Rose. ‘(Re)assembling Reference Books and Recycling Images: The Wood Engravings of the W. and R. Chambers Firm’ in Delamaire, Marie-Stéphanie and Slauter, Will. (eds.) Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century. 2021. Pp. 295-336.

Rosenthal, Angela. (ed.) No Laughing Matter: Visual Humours in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity. New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2016. See especially Hart, Katherine. ‘James Gillray, Charles James Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Caricature and Displacement in the Debate over Reform.’ Pp. 76-103.

Russell, Gillian. The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability, and the Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Sabor, Peter. ‘Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe, 1719-1920’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 9 (1996): 122-124.

Sillars, Stuart. Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709-1875. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press2008.

Shepherd, Lynn. Clarissa’s Painter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Skelly, Julia. The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600-2010. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2014.

Skilton, David. ‘The Relation between Illustration and Text in the Victorian Novel: A New Perspective’ in Höltgen, Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts. Erlangen-Nurnberg, 1988.Pp. 303-19.

Solkin, David H. ed. Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.

Solkin, David. Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Smiles,Sam. Eye Witness: Artists and Visual Documentation in Britain 1770-1830. Farnham: Ashgate, 2000.

Smith, Keith A. Structure of the Visual Book. 4th ed. Keith A. Smith Books: 2003.

Stafford, Barbara. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. MIT, 2003.

St Clair, William. The Reading Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Stewart, Garrett. The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006.

Tattersfield, Nigel. John Bewick: Engraver on Wood, 1760-1795: An Appreciation of His Life, together with an Annotated Catalogue of his Illustrations and Designs. London: British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2001.

Thackeray, William. ‘Pictures of Life and Character. By John Leech’ (1854), Critical Papers on Art. London: Macmillan, 1904.

Thomas. Julia. Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Value in Word and Image. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004.

Thomas, Sophie. “Poetry and Illustration” in The Blackwell Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. Charles Mahoney (Blackwell, 2011), pp. 354-373.

Wagner, Peter. (ed.) Icons, Texts, Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Berlin, 1996.

Walters, Gwyn. “Developments in the Study of Book Illustration.” The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-Century Bibliography. Ed. Peter Davison. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Wendorf, Richard. Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson. Minneapolis:Minnesota University Press, 1983.

Westover, Paul. ‘Illustration, Historicism, and Travel: The Legacy of Sir Walter Scott’, in Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750-1860. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. 142-73.

Whiteley, William T. Artists and Their Friends in England, 1700-1799. 1928; reprinted New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968.

Recent Posts

Women Printmakers in the Eighteenth Century: exploring the print and publishing life of Letitia Byrne in Women in Print

Hannah Lyons

Hannah Lyons is Assistant Curator of Art at Royal Museums Greenwich. She undertook her MA at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York, and her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her thesis was titled: ‘“exercising the ART as a TRADE”: Professional Women Printmakers in London, 1750-1850’. Previously she has worked at Tate Britain and Christ Church Picture Gallery, University of Oxford.

This post contains excerpts from Hannah’s chapter ‘Letitia Byrne (1779-1849) and the “prejudice against employing women as engravers”’ in Women in Print 1: Design and Identities.

In the West End of London, running north between Oxford Street and Great Portland Street, lies the half-mile stretch known as Great Titchfield Street. Now thronged with expensive restaurants, media companies, and the occasional, historic garment store, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Great Titchfield Street was the home to several artists families. Among the residents were the Scheemakers’ (sculptors, at No.18); the Bartolozzis’ (printmakers and printsellers, at No.81), the Rigauds’ (painters, at No.101), and, of particular interest to me, the Byrne family of engravers (at No.85). (1)

I was 2.5 miles from Great Titchfield Street, in the Prints and Drawings Study Room at the V&A in South Kensington, when I first encountered the Byrne family. I was a few months into my PhD research, sifting through solander box after solander box with only a 1970s typewritten list of object references as a guide, when I came across this print, clearly signed ‘Etched by Letitia Byrne’. The print was a fine topographical etching, made by a highly capable hand, after a drawing by the painter, George Samuel (fl.1785-1823).

Letitia Byrne, after George Samuel, A Cross at Clearwell, Gloucestershire, engraving with etching. © Victoria and Albert Museum, E.609-1966.

As I outline in my chapter published in Women in Print 1: Design and Identities, co-edited by Rose Roberto and Artemis Alexiou, I was quick to realise that Letitia Byrne’s extensive career (which I discovered spanned over fifty years), has been poorly documented. The information that I began to garner about her role and status within the burgeoning British art world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was primarily obtained through historical accounts that focus on her male relatives: her father, William Byrne (1743-1805), and her younger brother, John Byrne (1786-1847).

Indeed, despite the vast literature that exists on print culture, there are very few publications dedicated to those women – like Letitia Byrne – who worked in this historically male preserve, usually via familial and workshop networks, particularly those practicing in Britain in the long eighteenth century. (2) In recent years, as members of the Romantic Illustration Network will be aware, specialists have acknowledged that men and women played significant roles in the print trade. Antony Griffiths explains when discussing his methodology for his seminal book, The Print Before Photography (2016): ‘I have also abbreviated by referring to engravers, artists, and collectors as “he” rather than “he or she”, which would be more accurate.’ (3)

Aligned with, but separate from this, is the treatment of women printmakers in feminist art historical scholarship. Although feminist scholars have made important and significant progress in reconstructing the careers and output of women artists, this attention has largely focused on women working in media typically held in higher regard than print, such as painting and sculpture. The output of women artists such as Letitia Byrne, who made their living creating ‘reproductive’ prints, has been overlooked in favour of recovering and reconstructing the lives of women who created ‘original’ works of art. Women printmakers who made reproductive prints, then, have been triply marginalised in art historical scholarship because of their gender, their choice of media, and their seemingly uncreative work.

As outlined in Rose Roberto’s recent RIN blog, writing a chapter for Women in Print allowed me to dive deeper into Letitia Byrne’s lifecycle and examine her role and status in the British art world, as well as her prolific output. What I discovered was that Byrne lived as a young girl on Great Titchfield Street, where she was trained by her father, the engraver, William Byrne. William was one 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, becoming the most important centre for the production of new prints. It was in the traditional setting of his family home-cum-workshop that William taught all his five children (four girls and one boy) the techniques of etching and engraving.

By 1795, aged only fourteen or fifteen years old, Letitia Byrne was co-authoring prints with her father. She started exhibiting topographical and landscape watercolours at the Royal Academy of Arts, and she undertook engraving commissions from larger print publishers such as Cadell and Davies. My chapter covers her career, from the circulation of her prints to her personal and professional connections with artists and patrons. As Roberta and Alexiou point out in their Introduction, my chapter uses Letitia Byrne as a lens onto ‘the practical realities of living in a male-centered society … revealing the difficult decisions the female members had to make when assuming leadership and wage earning roles.’ (4)

Letitia Byrne, after John Byrne, Frogmore, Windsor, engraving with etching, published by WB Cooke, 9 Soho Square, and John Byrne, 54 Upper John Street, Soho. London October 1 1823. © Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 700903.

For those of you who are interested in reading more about Byrne’s overlooked but extensive output, do consult Women in Print, where several other fascinating case studies of women’s multilayered engagement with print culture can be found. And for those of you in London who would like to see some of Byrne’s exquisite prints in the flesh, ‘Print and Prejudice: Women Printmakers, 1700-1930’ is a free display currently at the V&A drawn from my PhD research: Print and Prejudice: Women Printmakers, 1700 – 1930 – Display at South Kensington · V&A (vam.ac.uk) (open until 1 May 2023). Spanning more than two centuries, this display highlights around 80 prints made by 18 different women printmakers, all from the museum’s collection. It reveals the diverse challenges and opportunities that these women faced. And crucially, it hopefully communicates to the general public how these artists shared in the long struggle for status in an art world that has too often seen print as a secondary, primarily reproductive medium.

Though the marketing title evokes the famous work of a rather well-known woman author, it is also a reference to Letitia Byrne’s complaint that she experienced: ‘a prejudice against employing female engravers.’ (5) It is hoped that this chapter, and the concurrent display, can bring Letitia Byrne’s life and work to both familiar and unfamiliar audiences.

Installation image of ‘Print and Prejudice: Women Printmakers, 1700-1930’ at the V&A, South Kensington (1 November 2022 – 1 May 2023). © Hannah Lyons.

(1) Chapter 23 – Great Titchfield Street’ in Philip Temple and Andrew Saint, eds., South-East Marylebone (New Haven: Published for the Bartlett School of Architecture by Yale University Press, 2017), p.36.  

(2) An important exception is David Alexander’s work on this subject.

(3) Antony Griffiths, The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550-1820 (London: The British Museum Press, 2016), p.12.

(4) Rose Roberto and Alexi Alexiou, eds., Women in Print: Design and Identities, Volume 1 (Oxford: Peter Lang Ltd 2022), p.5.

(5) Joseph Farington, Diary, 19 January 1819.

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