Upcoming Events

There Were Important Women in the History of Prints

Research Seminar – Cynthia E. Roman, Sheila O'Connell, Hannah Lyons, Cristina S. Martinez, Tim Clayton, Esther Chadwick

  • 12 March 2025
  • 5:00 – 7:00 pm
  • Paul Mellon Centre and Online

Join co-editors Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia Roman for a seminar on the collaborative volume Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c. 1700–1830. Discussion will focus on the genesis of the project and the diverse research methods and expertise among fifteen authors. Consideration will be given to a variety of strategies to recover and assess the contributions of women of differing social status and nationality to the production, culture and trade of prints. The challenges of research during pandemic restrictions and how they were mitigated by the growth of digital resources, as well as by dedicated staff of museums, archives and libraries, will be considered. Finally, the discussion will turn to what questions remain for future investigation.

Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c. 1700–1830 assembles international senior and rising scholars and showcases an array of exciting new research that reassesses the history of women in the graphic arts in the long eighteenth century. Fifteen essays present archival findings and insightful analyses that tell compelling stories about women across social classes and nations who persevered against the obstacles of their gender to make vital contributions as creative and skilled printmakers, astute entrepreneurs and savvy negotiators of copyright law in Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Italy and the United States.

Image credit: Lou McKeever, 2023. Inspired by the title page from Darly’s Comic-Prints of Characters, Caricatures, Macaronies c.1776.

Event format and access

The event will start with a presentation by Cristina Martinez and Cynthia Roman, lasting around 20 minutes, followed by comments from contributing authors (Nick Knowles, Hannah Lyons, Tim Clayton, and others). Esther Chadwick will be the respondent. Contributions will be followed by Q&A and a free drinks reception.

The event is hosted in our Lecture Room, which is up two flights of stairs (there is no lift). The talk will also be streamed online, and the recording will be published on our website.

About the speakers

  • Cynthia E. Roman is Curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. She is an active and widely published scholar of British art of the eighteenth century. Her work focuses on the history of prints and print collecting, and the work of women and amateur artists. In her role as Curator at the library, it has been her privilege to collaborate with a wide range of scholars on interdisciplinary exhibitions, programmes and publications. 

  • Sheila O’Connell studied art history at Birkbeck, University of London (BA, 1979) and was Andrew Mellon Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, 1985-86. She spent thirty years as curator of British prints at the British Museum. Her main publications were connected with exhibitions: The Popular Print in England (1999); London 1753 (2003); Britain Meets the World 1714-1830 (at the Forbidden City, Beijing, 2007); Bonaparte and the British: prints and propaganda in the age of Napoleon (with Tim Clayton, 2015). She also oversaw the on-line cataloguing of about 250,000 British prints. Since retiring in 2015 she has edited twelve books on London history for the London Topographical Society. Her most recent research has been for an article on Mary Darly (1736-91), known as the first professional woman cartoonist, published in The Imprint of Women (eds. C. Martinez and C. Roman, 2024). 

  • Hannah Lyons

    Hannah Lyons is Curator of Art at the University of Reading. Her Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded PhD, which was undertaken with Birkbeck, University of London and the V&A, examined the role, status and output of professional women printmakers in the long eighteenth century. This was supported by an AHRC-funded fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art (2018). In 2022–23, she curated Print and Prejudice: Women Printmakers, 1700–1930 at the V&A South Kensington. Her work on women artists has recently been included in: The Imprint of Women (2024), Maria Cosway: A strada eccezziunale di un’artista (exhibition catalogue, 2024), Now You See Us (exhibition catalogue, 2024) and Women in Print (2023).

  • Cristina S. Martinez is an interdisciplinary art historian who holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London. She has presented and published work on eighteenth-century British art, William Hogarth, the history of copyright law, Canadian art and artistic practices of appropriation. Cristina is the official biographer for the entry on Jane Hogarth in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and is completing a manuscript titled Hogarth and the Law: The Making, Circulation and Representation of Law in Eighteenth-Century Britain. She currently teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. 

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    Tim Clayton is an author and historian who has worked chiefly on print history and military history. His book The English Print 1688-1802 (1997) sought to trace the growth and themes of the London print trade in the eighteenth century; more recent work has concentrated on graphic satire and literary propaganda in Bonaparte and the British: prints and propaganda in the age of Napoleon (2015) and This Dark Business: the secret war against Napoleon (2018). His book James Gillray: a Revolution in Satire was published by PMC in 2022 and won the Berger Prize and the Apollo Award in 2023.

  • Esther Chadwick is a lecturer in art history at the Courtauld, where she specialises in eighteenth-century British art. She studied art history at the University of Cambridge and Yale. Before joining the Courtauld, she was a curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. Esther’s research addresses the materiality and agency of printed images, the role of art in the age of revolutions and the visual culture of the circum-Atlantic world. Exhibition projects have included Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain (Yale Center for British Art, 2014), A Revolutionary Legacy: Haiti and Toussaint Louverture (British Museum, 2018), William Blake’s Universe (Fitzwilliam Museum and Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2024) and Entangled Pasts, 1768-Now: Art, Colonialism and Change (Royal Academy of Arts, 2024). Her book, The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain was published by the Paul Mellon Centre in 2024.