Men’s reliance on the self-portrait print to cement their legacies and secure undying fame is well established. While a few outstanding women experimented with the genre, the medium’s peripatetic, sociable life – works that were gifted, liberally shared, and even transported on the body – was at odds with traditional ideas about women’s place within the private realm. Studying the handful of examples created by women across Europe from c. 1700 onwards – including etchings by Anna Maria van Schurman, Maria de Wilde, Angelika Kauffmann, and others – this chapter examines the strategies they developed to present themselves in print, ever mindful that by showing themselves off they risked opening themselves up to a range of personal and often harsh judgements.

The chapter is dedicated to the active career of the eighteenth-century printseller Jane Hogarth, widow of the painter and engraver William Hogarth. It looks at the means Jane employed to face competitors, namely by turning to copyright law in an effort to protect her property. In doing so, she set an important precedent in copyright law, whereby she obtained a special provision that would grant her the exclusive right to sell her husband’s prints. Letters, newspaper advertisements, legal reports, and even satirical prints by contemporaries offer insight into Jane’s commercial dealings, her powers of persuasion and the impact of her achievements.

The Horthemels and Hémery sisters were two sets of sister-printmakers living and working in eighteenth-century Paris. Despite their relative obscurity within contemporary scholarship, these 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 art market. By providing an in-depth exploration of the sisters’ careers – including their preliminary artistic training, roles within the family workshop, and personal and professional collaborations beyond the familial atelier – this chapter provides a 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. While the sisters’ familial and professional networks provided access to opportunities and certainly aided their success, both the Horthemels and Hémery sisters exercised independent ambition and initiative to ensure their reputations and future careers.

Mary Darly has been called the mother of British caricature, a pioneer who – with her husband Matthias – paved the way for the ‘golden age’ of satirical prints. This chapter reveals new details of her life and her twenty-four-year career gleaned largely from study of the Darly prints and newspaper advertisements. Mary saw the importance of prints in influencing political affairs: she produced satires before her marriage in 1759 as well as after her husband’s death in 1780, and she published some of the most virulent prints in the campaign against prime minister Lord Bute in 1762–1763. Appealing to the new fashion for images that exaggerated facial features, in 1762 she published the first how-to book in English, The Principles of Caricatura Drawing. The Darlys produced a wide range of prints but their greatest success came in the 1770s with a series of caricatures of well-known people described as ‘Macaronies’. Designs were provided by enthusiastic amateurs and people flocked to the Darly shop near Charing Cross for their annual exhibitions – the first commercial print shows in London.

This chapter investigates Caroline Watson’s understudied theatrical subjects which testify to her technical mastery and ambitious agenda as a printmaker and provide a lens for examining how gender, printmaking hierarchies, and patronage impacted her exceptional career as a female stipple engraver. Her prints of female Shakespearean characters, Garrick Speaking the Ode and Sarah Siddons as Euphrasia, after Robert Edge Pine, from the early 1780s, and her two large plates for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery in the 1790s affiliated her with Shakespeare and the most significant artistic enterprise of the late eighteenth century. In terms of scale, narrative complexity, and narrative scope, Watson’s theatrical prints demonstrate her extraordinary skill as a stipple engraver and challenge gender and printmaking hierarchies. Appointed Engraver to the Queen in 1785, Watson signed her prints, publishing a number under her own name, and supported herself comfortably through her printmaking. Despite her professional achievement and technical prowess, her extended independent career was circumscribed by hierarchies of gender that paralleled artistic hierarchies.

In the early stages of Thomas Rowlandson’s printmaking career, at least ninety of his prints are known to have been issued by women publishers, including Elizabeth Jackson, Hannah Humphrey, Elizabeth d’Achery, and Eleanor Lay. Of these, Jackson in particular had an important role in establishing his printmaking. The full extent of her production, for a long time obscured by the later sale of her plates to Samuel Fores, is only just emerging; several recent new discoveries suggest an even wider involvement by her in Rowlandson’s early non-satirical prints. While there is relatively little to be found in the historical record about these enterprising women, evidence from the prints shows the women were successful entrepreneurs, commissioning their own caricature output and collaborating commercially with other printsellers. Another figure of particular interest is Rowlandson’s younger sister Elizabeth, who, after her separation from her husband, the artist Samuel Howitt, also operated as a printseller for over twenty years. She was also an artist and even made a few caricature prints herself after her brother’s drawings, some of which are identified here for the first time.

The etchings of noble women working as non-professional artists outside the commercial spaces of the print trade have long been under-appreciated and even dismissed for their amateur status. During their lifetime, etchings by Isabella Byron, Lady Carlisle; Lady Louisa Augusta Greville; and Miss Amabel Yorke, later Lady Polworth and her younger cousin Miss Caroline York were valued and preserved in the private spaces of albums compiled by the prominent collectors Horace Walpole and Richard Bull. With this reassessment, the legacy of their work, its cultural and social currency, and its reception among contemporaries can be reinserted as a vital component in the broader story of women printmakers.

This chapter offers a reassessment of the life and work of the French professional printmaker Catherine Elisabeth Cousinet (born 1726), also known as Madame Lempereur through her marriage to fellow printmaker Louis Simon Lempereur. Over the course of three decades, Elisabeth Cousinet created a range of impressive, single-sheet engravings after landscape and genre paintings owned by important and well-appointed individuals in Paris, Europe’s cosmopolitan cultural center. Her connections to these collectors integrated her into networks in the French printmaking industry and, by extension, abroad. Despite the dearth of historical evidence, her biography provides a broad outline of, and a few tantalizing glimpses into, what the career of a successful women professional printmaker in eighteenth-century France might have looked like.

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. Weaving key examples throughout, it highlights the centrality of the family workshop in framing and encouraging women’s printed productions. However, it also exposes the gendered mechanisms at play within these overlapping commercial and domestic spaces.

Despite the degree to which the printmaking family facilitated and often encouraged women’s work, the small body of literature specifically focusing on printmaking families in the eighteenth century has often obscured the role of women within these workshops. Printmaking apprenticeships were largely closed to women in this period, and this chapter reveals that the family workshop gave many women an invaluable social and economic opportunity to work, to earn money, to create prints, and to forge an artistic identity. In turn, their labour was often crucial for the running of the family workshop, providing income but also enabling other relatives to fashion their own artistic identities in turn.

Today, only twenty signed etchings by Laura Piranesi, daughter of the famous printmaker Giovanni Battista, are known. Her work has never been assessed independently from that produced by her father and brother. Documents newly discovered in Roman archives bring to light fresh biographical details and important milestones including her education in her father’s studio making vedute (cityscapes or vistas), a genre much appreciated by foreign tourists. In this chapter, her prints held in museum collections are, for the first time, catalogued separately from those of her family members. Showing great ability as an etcher, her small views of ancient and modern Roman monuments are in keeping with the subjects of larger views by her father; conversely, her picturesque style is very different.

Eliza Cox Akin and Mary Graham Charles were the wives and partners to two of the most important American caricaturists of the nineteenth-century, James Akin and William Charles. Surviving engravings and historical ephemera reveal that these women contributed to their husbands’ engraving businesses and that Eliza participated in engraving prints. In order to establish an appreciation of the role women played in the early American printmaking world, this chapter examines the lives of Eliza Cox Akin and Mary Graham Charles and considers their position in producing, and within the market for, engravings in the United States during the late 1790s and early 1800s.