Chapter 3 - Caroline Watson and the Theatre of Printmaking

Summary

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.

Caroline Watson (1760/61–1814) has been singled out by David Alexander as ‘the first British woman professional engraver’ with an extended independent career.¹ In terms of her well-documented oeuvre, lifetime fame, and professional and financial success as a stipple engraver, she is an outlier. Women printmakers rarely signed their prints so their work often went unacknowledged.² Watson signed her prints and even published a number under her own name (1785–1788), notably the portraits of the Royal Princesses Mary and Sophia after John Hoppner, from Fitzroy Street, where she was living at the time with her barrister brother.³ The engraved portrait of Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, which was dedicated to the Queen, was published on 1 March 1785. Although Watson did not receive any official royal commissions, she was appointed Engraver to the Queen in 1785, and used the honorary title, which added cachet, in signing her prints.⁴ Little is known about Watson’s personal life. After her father’s death in 1790, she lived with her aunt, Elizabeth Judkins. Her professional success and recognition notwithstanding, William Hayley’s obituary acknowledged the constraints of gender noting: ‘Her great modesty prevented her being so well known as her merit deserved.’⁵

Watson is best known for her portrait engravings after such leading artists as Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Hoppner, George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, and Thomas Lawrence. This chapter focuses on an understudied aspect of her oeuvre – her theatrical prints – which will serve as a lens for reexamining how issues of gender, printmaking hierarchies, and patronage both shaped and circumscribed her exceptional career as a female stipple engraver. The only other contemporary female printmaker (and painter) specialising in stipple in England was Marie Anne Bourlier (active 1801–1824), who engraved portraits of the royal family after William Beechey. Watson’s theatrical prints, which stand out in terms of their scale and narrative complexity are, arguably, her most significant contribution in the arena of printmaking. The four large theatrical subjects she engraved for Robert Edge Pine – Ophelia (from Hamlet), Miranda (from The Tempest), Mrs. Siddons as Euphrasia, and Garrick Speaking the Ode – and the two large plates, The Death of Cardinal Beaufort and Ferdinand and Miranda Playing Chess, commissioned for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, testify to the scope of her ambitions as a printmaker and her technical prowess in graphically translating dramatic multifigure subjects in stipple.

Early Career and Patronage

Watson pursued printmaking under the tutelage of her father, James Watson (c. 1740–1790), a leading mezzotint engraver, though there is no documentation regarding her training in stipple engraving.⁶ Stipple or ‘the dotted manner’, a quicker, less technically demanding engraving process in which tone was added with numerous dots, was adopted in England beginning in the mid-1770s. It was widely employed for reproducing portraits, decorative designs, and small paintings and drawings, and could be printed in colour to resemble a chalk drawing.⁷ Stipple engraving was also financially advantageous because it was faster and more impressions could be pulled without reworking the original plate than with other types of intaglio.⁸ In 1780, Watson produced her first stipple plates, including the frontispiece to a life of Isaac Watts, which was favourably mentioned in the Gentleman’s Magazine.⁹ She received commissions from Robert Edge Pine and especially John Boydell in the early 1780s, which were crucial in launching her career. Over the years Watson worked with various publishers including Robert Cribb, Rudolph Ackermann, and the Italian-born printseller Anthony Molteno, who published some of her prints and sold them at his shop.¹⁰

Earning a living from printmaking was challenging, especially for women, who often lacked access to specialised technical training and the artistic and commercial networks to produce and market their prints. Besides commissioning prints, leading publishers, like Boydell, published catalogues and purchased stocks of plates and reissued them, as was the case with the plates Watson engraved after Pine. Watson benefited from familial training and support and her father’s extensive artistic network. As the daughter of a prominent printmaker, she had a genteel upbringing and grew up observing her father working on plates at home. Although it is not known why Watson elected to specialise in stipple rather than mezzotint, it was fashionable, less technically demanding and, I suspect, affirmed her artistic independence by differentiating her from her father.

Prints were priced according to the size of the plate, the quality, and amount of work involved.¹¹ The elegantly printed advertisement for a portrait of Mary Amelia Cecil, Marchioness of Salisbury, engraved after a miniature by Robert Bowyer (1790), offers an illuminating example of how prints were niche marketed at different price points as prestigious commodities, whose allure was enhanced by distinguished patrons and honorifics.¹² Published by Bowyer, Miniature Painter to His Majesty, the portrait was engraved by Caroline Watson, Engraver to Her Majesty, and dedicated to Her Royal Highness, the Princess Royal. The delicate stipple engraving, which displays Watson’s technical skill in rendering fine details and tonal contrasts, retains the intimacy of a miniature. Marketed to appeal to members of the nobility, wealthy gentry, and upscale collectors, the advertisement stated that orders could be placed with Mr. Bowyer or Mrs. Ryland for the finest proof impressions at 10s 6d (10 shillings and sixpence), or 6s for regular impressions.

From the outset, Watson was patronised by prominent women, notably Frances Coutts, wife of the first Marquess of Bute, whose portrait she engraved.¹³ Throughout her career, she benefited from female patronage and cultivated a female clientele. In addition to dedicating prints to prominent women including members of the royal family, she collaborated with women artists, such as Catherine Fanshawe, whom she may have instructed in printmaking.¹⁴ The most noteworthy example of this female-centric approach is the series of twelve aquatint plates Watson made after Maria Cosway, illustrating Mary Robinson’s poem, The Winter’s Day, which was produced by women for a predominantly female audience.¹⁵ The project, announced in The Morning Post on 20 November 1800, took several years to complete. The prints were published in 1803; the letter press is dated 1804. The Literary Magazine, and American Register enthused, ‘the genius of three ladies, in different departments, are happily and splendidly combined’.¹⁶

Except for Garrick Speaking the Ode, Watson’s theatrical prints from the early 1780s focus on female characters from Shakespeare and the actress Sarah Siddons (1755–1831), a theatrical sensation and popular female role model, widely admired for her powerful acting and her domestic virtue. Although Watson did not exhibit publicly, her prints circulated fairly widely as frontispieces and individual plates, and were highly regarded.¹⁷ Her prestigious commissions for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery affiliated her with the most significant artistic enterprise of the late eighteenth century. In the 1786 prospectus, Watson figured alongside the leading engravers and artists in England. The only other female participant was Angelika Kauffmann, who contributed two paintings.¹⁸ In examining Watson’s theatrical prints and their significance within her oeuvre, I am particularly interested in scrutinizing how individual agency, gender, patronage, market factors, and technical considerations intersected in moulding her successful career as an independent female printmaker.

Theatrical Subjects from the Early 1780s

Robert Edge Pine (1730–1788) probably became aware of Caroline Watson as a printmaker through her father. Primarily known as a portraitist, Pine exhibited at the Society of Artists (1760–1771), and at the Royal Academy, but harboured history painting ambitions. A political radical who supported the American Revolution, he painted an allegorical picture, America (1778), known through an engraving.¹⁹ In April 1782, Pine exhibited seven subjects drawn from Shakespeare in the Great Room at Spring Gardens, anticipating Boydell’s multimedia Shakespeare Gallery, launched in 1786. The catalogue that accompanied Pine’s ambitious exhibition included a prospectus for a series of seven large engravings to be published in pairs after his pictures in the chalk manner by the best engravers.²⁰ Although Caroline Watson’s name does not appear in the newspaper advertisements, Pine commissioned her to engrave two Shakespeare subjects (Miranda from the Tempest and Ophelia from Hamlet), Garrick Speaking the Ode (intended as the first plate), and Mrs. Siddons as Euphrasia, which was added later.²¹ Watson’s collaboration with Pine ended abruptly in 1784 when he departed for Philadelphia. According to Edward Edwards, the exhibition failed to meet Pine’s expectations, and only some of the prints were completed.²² Boydell purchased the copperplates from Pine and reissued them under his own name in 1784. Miranda and Ophelia, which feature female protagonists, were dedicated to prominent aristocratic women associated with the Opposition – Ophelia to the Duchess of Norfolk, and Miranda to the Duchess of Devonshire – indicating a concerted effort to market them to a female clientele, as does the inclusion of the print of Siddons in the series.²³

When she returned triumphantly to Drury Lane Theatre in October 1782, Siddons appeared as Euphrasia in Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter, which remained one of her most acclaimed tragic roles. Artists including William Hamilton, John Keyse Sherwin, the young Thomas Lawrence, and Pine rushed to depict Siddons in the heroic role.²⁴ Siddons posed for Pine in January 1783. His ambitious painting of Mrs. Siddons as Euphrasia was a speculative venture intended to capitalise on her celebrity, raise his profile, and promote his art. An advertisement in The Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser, 18 March 1783, extolled Mr. Pine’s picture and invited readers to view the original at his house in Piccadilly. Pine also proposed having an elegant print engraved from it ‘with the utmost expedition’.²⁵ In 1785, Watson engraved Siddons and Kemble in the Characters Tancred and Sigismunda (BM 1931,0509.170) after a miniature by Charles Shirreff, on exhibit at the Royal Academy. The subscription refers to her as ‘Miss Watson, Engraver to her Majesty’, attesting to her name recognition. In April 1785, Shirreff advertised the print for 10s 6d, with subscriptions taken by three other printsellers and her father, James Watson. The print, published by Shirreff on 12 December 1785 (according to the inscription), was advertised in The Morning Post under Boydell’s name in January 1786, with proofs at 10s 6d, and prints at 6 shillings.²⁶

Although it’s tempting to posit a direct connection between Siddons and Watson, I have not uncovered any documentary evidence; however, there is an intriguing theatrical connection. Watson engraved Lady Elizabeth Foster’s portrait after John Downman in 1788, one of a set of six oval prints after Downman’s large portrait drawings of fashionable beauties that had served as scenery for the private theatrical production of Arthur Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him at Richmond House in 1787. Siddons’s portrait, which was engraved by P. W. Tomkins, was part of the series which included fashionable aristocratic ladies – the Duchess of Richmond, Lady Elizabeth Foster, Lady Duncannon, and the Duchess of Devonshire – who had attended the performance, as well as Siddons and Elizabeth Farren, attesting to high society’s infatuation with the stage. The prints were marketed both individually and as a set for 36 shillings in black or brown ink, or 3 guineas, printed in colours.²⁷

Pine’s commission to engrave the plates depicting Miranda in The Tempest, Act I, Sc. 2, and Ophelia in Hamlet, Act IV, Sc. 5, was an important opportunity for Watson to demonstrate her printmaking abilities. Reproducing a painting as a print was a complex process of translation from one medium to another that required technical skill and artistic interpretation.²⁸ With their youthful female protagonists, the subjects were well-suited to the delicacy and finesse of stipple, which was associated with women and fashion. Critics of stipple like John Landseer attacked it as inferior, lacking vigour, and propelled by fashion and degenerate taste.²⁹ Relatively large at 38 × 43 cm, the two engravings, though not obviously linked except for their female protagonists and Shakespearean subjects, were marketed as a pair, titled Miranda and Ophelia, respectively, underscoring their feminine focus. Miranda, published by Pine c. 1782, was reissued by Boydell in 1784.³⁰ Ophelia, initially published c. 1782–1784, was reissued in the same format on 1 June 1784. The scene from the Tempest depicting Miranda’s excitement at the sight of Ferdinand exhibits a high level of technical skill and a finely modulated tonal range. The scene focuses on the figures of Prospero and, especially, Miranda, whose delicate form and luminous white dress glow against the darker landscape background. The crowded court scene from Hamlet showcases Ophelia, her mind unhinged by her father’s death and Hamlet’s abandonment. Crowned with weeds and wildflowers, she stands at centre stage before the King and Queen, singing and mindlessly distributing herbs, as Laertes weeps at far right. The dramatically illuminated figure of Ophelia flutters like a moth in the shadowy medieval hall. The inconsistencies in scale and anatomical defects are attributable to Pine whose weak drawing was criticised by Edwards.

Imaginary illustrations inspired by Shakespeare, like those of Pine, were grounded in the text, rather than stage performance, and were glossed with quotations. Pine’s paintings anticipate the ambitious cycle of Shakespeare subjects Boydell would commission from leading artists a few years later for his Gallery, which he loftily aligned with the promotion of history painting and British nationalism and endeavoured to distance from the taint of theatre.³¹ From the outset, Boydell faced the problem of securing a sufficient number of expert engravers to rapidly produce large and small prints after the paintings for the subscribers. Line engraving, the most costly and time-consuming intaglio process, was the gold standard for reproductive prints after paintings. Stipple, which was faster and less expensive, was effective for small-scale prints, especially the rendering of delicate detail, but lacked the sharp definition of form and tonal variety of line engraving. The issue of quality as opposed to speed would haunt Boydell and his nephew, Josiah. In their struggle to deliver the quasi-industrial volume of plates for the Shakespeare Gallery in a timely manner, they relied increasingly on mixed techniques and stipple engraving.³² Widespread complaints about delays and the declining quality of the plates contributed to the sharp fall-off in subscriptions.³³

Watson’s large (47.4 × 35.9 cm) engraving of Mrs. Siddons as Euphrasia (Figure 3.1) offered a more expansive expressive register to demonstrate her technical and interpretive skill. Not included in the original project, it was presumably added to cash in on Siddons’s celebrity.³⁴ Vengefully brandishing a dagger raised over the body of the tyrant, Dionysus, Siddons, directs her gaze toward her aged shackled father. Giving concrete form to the lines from The Grecian Daughter inscribed below, ‘… in a dear Father’s cause, / A Woman’s vengeance tow’rs above her Sex’, Siddons’s lofty figure, forceful pose, and expression of calm fury are strikingly rendered. Overall, the effect is more dynamic and sculptural than the Miranda or Ophelia engravings. Represented in close-up view, her body pivoting in space, Siddons is dramatically illuminated from the upper right. Rather than an invented illustration, Mrs. Siddons as Euphrasia is a theatrical portrait based on her emotionally gripping performance in The Grecian Daughter, which contemporaries extolled. Artists including Hamilton, Lawrence, Sherwin, and Pine depicted Siddons in The Grecian Daughter in the early 1780s, and her image was widely disseminated in print form.³⁵

Figure 3.1 Caroline Watson, after Robert Edge Pine, Mrs. Siddons as Euphrasia, 1784. Stipple engraving, 47.4 × 35.9 cm.

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

David Alexander considers it one of Watson’s least satisfactory prints, due to Siddons’s lack of frenzied emotion; however, the criticism seems misplaced since she was reproducing Pine’s painting for which the actress had posed.³⁶ I contend that Mrs. Siddons as Euphrasia should be recognised as one of Watson’s most impressive achievements and that it closely parallels contemporary accounts of her stage performances. Her expression, which combines tenderness with resolve, is subtly transcribed, including her raised eyebrows and powerful gaze. It was widely acknowledged by contemporaries that Siddons’s statuesque poses were influenced by classical sculpture, which she greatly admired and emulated in her own sculptural works.³⁷ Her pose in the print closely resembles one of Gilbert Austin’s Seven Attitudes by Mrs. Siddons, illustrated in Chironomia (1806).³⁸ Moreover, Pine’s heroic portrayal and Watson’s print after it were doubtless intended to highlight the powerful resolve and fortitude that propelled Euphrasia to slay Dionysus and rescue her father. Like the other prints Pine commissioned from Watson, it was produced in both a plain and a coloured version, printed in red to resemble a chalk drawing. Although Mrs. Siddons as Euphrasia demonstrates Watson’s skill at capturing emotion and translating the drama of the stage in graphic form, she only created one other small-scale theatrical portrait, namely, Siddons and Kemble as Tancred and Sigismunda (1785), discussed earlier in this section.

Watson’s largest stipple, Garrick Speaking the Ode, after Pine, which measures 62.5 × 45.5 cm, was published by Pine on 1 March 1783, and reissued by Boydell on 25 March 1784. Dedicated to Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Queen of the Blue-Stockings’, it was captioned with the concluding verses of the Jubilee Ode. Pine, who had previously painted Garrick’s portrait, bombastically reenvisioned his climactic recitation of the Ode at the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee, hoping to leverage his posthumous celebrity as the leading interpreter and promoter of Shakespeare.³⁹ Although the procession of Shakespeare characters was rained out at Stratford-upon-Avon, it was successfully restaged at Drury Lane. The plate would have posed particular technical challenges due to its ambitious scale, over-the-top subject, idiosyncratic cast of characters, and otherworldly incandescent lighting. The gesticulating figure of Garrick, declaiming the ‘Ode to Shakespeare’ and apotheosising the bard’s statue, is the only solid element in the murky otherworldly mishmash of Shakespearean characters. To the left of the statue, the Tragic Muse, King Lear, and Cordelia’s lifeless body are represented, with Hecate revealing the bloody dagger to Macbeth in the background. At the right, the Comic Muse, Falstaff, Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel are pictured.⁴⁰ The 1782 pamphlet described the cast of characters as, ‘all uniting to express the extensive luxurious imagination of the Great Author’.⁴¹ The motley cast and conceptual incoherence of the composition should be laid at the feet of its creator, Pine, rather than Watson. In Shakespeare Sacrificed: – or the Offering to Avarice (1789), James Gillray maliciously deconstructed Pine’s hyperbolic homage, replacing the figure of Garrick with Boydell – the destroyer and commercial exploiter of Shakespeare.

The Boydell Commissions

The only comparably ambitious theatrical prints Watson would produce were the two large plates commissioned for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, The Death of Cardinal Beaufort from Henry VI, Pt. II, Act III, Sc. 3, after Reynolds, first state (1790); second state (1792), and Ferdinand and Miranda Playing Chess from The Tempest, Act V, Sc. 1 (1795), after Francis Wheatley, both 57.4 × 40.7 cm. Watson was paid £210 for each print, a standard rate at the lower end of the remuneration scale, but double what Wheatley received – a mere £105.⁴² The commission for the Death of Cardinal Beaufort was due to Reynolds’s insistence that Watson engrave his painting. She engraved numerous portraits after Reynolds, including his Self-Portrait (c. 1788) wearing spectacles, widely considered the best print of Reynolds.⁴³ Boydell, who commissioned numerous prints from Watson, was aware of her technical skill and previous experience engraving subjects from Shakespeare. The intimate genre-like depiction of Miranda and Ferdinand playing chess after Wheatley showcases Watson’s delicate stippling and subtle modelling of the illuminated figures, which glow against the dark background of the cave, demonstrating her mastery of lighting and tonal effects.⁴⁴

The task of engraving Death of Cardinal Beaufort, which garnered mixed reviews when it was exhibited at the Shakespeare Gallery in 1789, proved challenging on artistic as well as technical grounds. Reynolds, who never profited from engravings after his own pictures, was initially reluctant to participate in Boydell’s speculative venture. According to James Northcote, Reynolds considered it degrading to paint for a printseller.⁴⁵ Since Henry VI was not mounted on the London stage during Reynolds’s lifetime, the picture had no direct theatrical connection. The close-up depiction of the dying cardinal, which was based on an earlier oil sketch, was exhibited at the Shakespeare Gallery in 1789, where its resemblance to Nicolas Poussin’s well-known Death of Germanicus was noted in the press.⁴⁶ According to William Mason, Reynolds’s model for the Cardinal was an elderly porter or coal heaver, who posed grinning in the throes of death.⁴⁷ The controversial fiend (which was a figure of speech) behind the dying cardinal was widely criticised and ridiculed. In The Bee, Humphry Repton complained that the fiend was beneath the dignity of the subject and the artist and did not figure in Shakespeare’s dramatis personae.⁴⁸ However, Reynolds stubbornly refused to remove the troublesome fiend, even at Edmund Burke’s urging. In the first state of the print, dated 25 March 1790, as in the painting, the fiend is clearly visible behind the Cardinal’s head. Following Reynolds’s death, presumably at Boydell’s instigation, the fiend was removed from the painting and the engraving. In the final state, dated 1 August 1792, the fiend was laboriously scraped out, but faint vestiges remained on the plate.⁴⁹ The murky bedside scene, with its dramatic chiaroscuro effect evokes mezzotint, which was often used for reproducing Reynolds’s paintings, though Watson used stipple and etching. The caricatural quality of the heads, especially the cardinal’s grotesque grimace and clawing hand in the painting were faithfully transcribed in Watson’s print.⁵⁰ The fiend and grimacing cardinal are emblematic of the pitfalls of attempting to translate Shakespeare’s text too literally in visual form, even for an artist as gifted as Reynolds.⁵¹

Watson’s Legacy

In concluding, I would like to circle back to the self-effacing nature of reproductive printmaking and the largely invisible, marginalised role of women printmakers with which I began.⁵² Although Watson was exceptional in terms of her professional achievement and technical skill, her career was circumscribed by hierarchies of gender that paralleled artistic hierarchies. When she began publishing prints in the 1780s, the print market was booming, facilitating her success in the fashionable arena of stipple engraving. However, we should not overlook the key elements that made her professional career possible, namely, familial support, access to high-calibre technical training, and the network of artists and printsellers she collaborated with, many of whom had worked with her father. The role of female patronage and Watson’s impact on printmaking are more difficult to assess due to lack of documentation.

Watson’s graphic oeuvre provides the most direct window into her artistic persona and technical prowess. As the prints she produced for Pine and Boydell demonstrate, by her early twenties, as an engraver, she was the equal of her male counterparts. Her pendant portraits of William Woollett, Historical Engraver to His Majesty (1785), and Benjamin West, Historical Painter to His Majesty (1786), after Gilbert Stuart, engraved from the original pictures belonging to Boydell, place her at the centre of the London art world in the mid-1780s. Watson proved highly adept at interpreting and distilling the distinctive styles of painters ranging from Pine to Reynolds to Romney. In the portraits of the Princesses Mary and Sophia after Hoppner, Watson adopted a more delicate technique in response to his style. The series of preparatory proofs for the Princesses’ portraits in the British Museum reveal her meticulous working method in which she gradually worked up the face and developed the modelling and shading in successive proofs.⁵³ Reynolds valued Watson highly and selected her to engrave numerous portraits including Contemplation (1790), one of her masterpieces.

Examining the arc of her career, Watson rapidly gained a stellar professional reputation and arguably reached her apogee in the 1780s to mid–1790s, when she created her largest most ambitious individual prints of theatrical subjects. After completing the plates for the Shakespeare Gallery, her scope gradually narrowed. After 1800, she made fewer single prints sold through print shops and worked primarily for the book trade and private patrons, creating small literary portraits, notably for Richard Phillips.⁵⁴ Despite declining health, she remained active and even mastered a new technique – aquatint – for the illustrations for The Winter’s Day (1803), after drawings by Maria Cosway. Watson’s last major undertaking was the plates she engraved after Romney for William Hayley’s Life of Romney (1809), replacing William Blake. The only substantive information we have about Watson beyond her prints is her correspondence with Hayley (1805–1810), at the end of her career.⁵⁵ Although her letters are mostly about personal matters including her health, they also include a technical discussion about the challenges of joining copperplates, which attests to her professional expertise and passion for printmaking. Despite his high regard for her talent, Hayley was a difficult, demanding patron, who paid her only 25 guineas per plate.⁵⁶ Based on estimates of her earnings, Watson was able to support herself comfortably through her printmaking.⁵⁷ She died well off and left a £70 annuity to her aunt, who survived her.⁵⁸ That Watson earned her living primarily from engraving portraits is not surprising in light of the preponderance of portrait painting in England and the popularity and marketability of prints. She eschewed the conventional decorative production that many female printmakers depended on. Watson’s large theatrical prints, her most ambitious printmaking endeavour, challenged the perceived limits of the stipple technique and gender hierarchies.

The worsening financial situation in the 1790s, which contributed to Boydell’s bankruptcy, adversely impacted the print market, and may explain Watson’s diminished production. Printmaking was highly competitive and even the most gifted practitioners often struggled to earn a living. James Gillray (1756–1815), who trained at the Royal Academy Schools, abandoned reproductive printmaking and turned to satirical prints to earn a living. When he wrote to Boydell asking to participate in the Shakespeare Gallery, he was summarily turned down, presumably because Boydell deemed him unsuitable for his lofty enterprise. Gillray took his revenge with his devastating send up, Shakespeare Sacrificed – or the Offering to Avarice (1789), viciously pillorying Boydell as ‘the commercial Maecenas’.

In his brief obituary, Hayley noted Watson’s honorary title as Engraver to Her Majesty and praised her as ‘a most amiable woman, and an accomplished artist’.⁵⁹ He underscored her ‘unremitting industry’ and the high value Reynolds and West placed on her talents. Despite poor health, she was working on an engraving after a Bartolomé E. Murillo painting from the Marquis of Bute’s collection at the time of her death. Hayley also expressed regret that, except to a select few, Watson was not as well known as she deserved to be. It is only recently that Watson has emerged from the shadows into the limelight in the theatre of printmaking.⁶⁰ This chapter sheds new light on the significance of Watson’s theatrical prints which have received little attention. In terms of scale, narrative complexity, and expressive scope, they demonstrate her extraordinary skill as a stipple engraver and challenge gender and printmaking hierarchies. Reassessing Watson’s career is part of a broader examination of women printmakers and the professional obstacles they faced which entails reevaluating reproductive printmaking as a collaborative artistic endeavour in which women made their mark and demonstrated their technical and interpretive abilities despite gender constraints.⁶¹