Chapter 5 - Living ‘in the bosom of a numerous and worthy family’

Summary

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.