If world politics today is changing worlds, it was no less so in late 18th century Britain; there was the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and the changing millennium. Chadwick’s book looks at the art world’s responses over the period 1770 to 1830 through in-depth studies of five printmakers: James Barry (1741 – 1806), John Hamilton Mortimer (1740 – 1779), James Gillray (1756 – 1815), Thomas Bewick (1753 – 1828) and William Blake (1757 – 1827).
At that time the British art world’s premier establishment was the Royal Academy of Arts, founded in 1768. But print was seen largely as reprographic therefore subservient as a medium. Printmakers were not allowed to enrol in the Academy for anything other than drawing classes. Yet Chadwick demonstrates “far from being devoid of invention, composition, intellect and originality, printmaking in Britain [is] revealed … as generative, innovative, experimental and critical.” It is the printmaker’s engagement with critical politics that is the heart of this book. Barry’s print The Phoenix, or the Resurrection of Freedom, 1776, references Liberty, an issue relating to the ongoing American War of Independence. His use of aquatint was seen as a looser, more liberated medium than etching.
Mortimer, in his Fifteen Etchings dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1778, strikes out against the ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ of the academic teaching of the Academy’s president, Reynolds. Gillray’s graphic political satires sought from the politics in newspapers and public spaces, references also looks at the mechanisms in which information and news are transmitted, noting the prints themselves could be folded and posted.
The chapter on Thomas Bewick takes on the realm of economics. Bewick is known largely for his vignettes of natural history, but he was also an engraver of bank notes, for both local banks and at a national level; the Bank of England was on a quest to find an un-forgeable note, and Berwick’s skill made one medium, copper etching, look like another, boxwood engraving. Lastly, Blake’s prints are set in the context of the apocalyptic visions and the French Revolution evoked.
Seen in the context of their times, it is printmakers that are by far the more reactive than the Academy’s artists. Yet the Academy was not to grant engravers equality with its other members until 1928.
Esther Chadwick, The Radical Print; Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2024.
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