Chapter 4 - ‘Talent and Untiring Diligence’

Summary

This chapter provides new insights into Neoclassicism, Nazarene art, and translational printmaking through an overview of the long-neglected prints of three female artists from German-speaking countries. Angelika Kauffmann, a central figure of Neoclassicism was active in many countries. Prints by her own hand as well as reproductive prints by others after her original paintings helped spread her fame as a history painter. Her success set an example for younger women artists such as Marie Ellenrieder, who admired Kauffmann, even as she moved beyond Neoclassicism to become an important Nazarene creating numerous works for the Catholic Church, including devotional prints and altar paintings. While Kauffmann and Ellenrieder both worked as painters and printmakers, the older artist Maria Katharina Prestel worked exclusively as an interpretive printmaker. With her husband, she maintained a workshop in which she reproduced drawings, sometimes using newly developed graphic techniques.

When the German scholar Friedrich Sickler and the artist Johann Christian Reinhart published their essay ‘Something about Angelika’ in the first volume of the Almanach aus Rom in 1810, they noted admiringly that ‘what she has become she owes entirely to her talent and untiring diligence’.¹ This chapter will show that this not only applies to Angelika Kauffmann (1741 Chur – Rome 1807) but is equally true for Maria Katharina Prestel (1747 Nuremberg – London 1797) and Marie Ellenrieder (1791 Konstanz – Konstanz 1863). The focus will be on the printed oeuvres of these three women artists. Kauffmann and Ellenrieder were primarily painters, but both also created important bodies of graphic work. Kauffmann is undisputedly one of the central artistic personalities of the era around 1800. While her subject matter and style align with those of her time, she played an exemplary role as a female artist and her international success made her an influential model for other younger women. Ellenrieder was one of those admirers whose emulation of Kauffmann’s professional achievements was perhaps enhanced by a shared personal connection to the vicinity of Lake Constance where they both lived at least temporarily.² Their artistic relationship was already noted by their contemporaries.³ In their printmaking, however, both artists created their very own distinct oeuvres, as did Prestel, who worked exclusively as a reproductive printmaker. Initially working together with her husband Johann Gottlieb, she created a body of work independent from any models and without any successors.

All three women were recognised by the public even if the degrees of their material success varied considerably. In the period around 1800, it remained difficult for women, despite the many ongoing political upheavals, to overcome existing social barriers and work as professional artists. Only very few succeeded in doing so. Printmaking’s technical requirements, often only available within a workshop context, represented further limitations. The three artist-printmakers discussed here therefore stand for only a very small group of women artists pursuing printmaking during this time.⁴

Angelika Kauffmann

Life and Early Beginnings

Kauffmann was born in 1741 in Chur (today in the Swiss canton of Graubünden) where German, Italian, and Romansh was spoken. Her father was an itinerant artist who taught her to paint. She grew up in Valtellina and Lombardy. Angelika, who made her first portrait paintings while still a young girl, was regarded as a child prodigy. After the death of her mother in Milan in 1757, Johann Josef Kauffmann temporarily returned with his daughter to his native Schwarzenberg in what is now the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. Having undertaken portrait commissions in the Lake Constance region, father and daughter went back to Italy, where they lived from 1758 to 1766, mostly in Rome. Letters of recommendation from Count Karl Joseph von Firmian, whose portrait she had painted in 1754, opened the doors for her to the highest echelons of society. She soon had success as one of the rare female painters and printmakers and was made honorary member of the academies in Bologna, Florence, and Rome. In the spring of 1766, she travelled from Rome to London where, a year later, she already received commissions from the royal family. Together with the still-life painter Mary Moser she was one of only two female founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in December 1768.

In 1781 she married the painter Antonio Zucchi and accompanied him to his native city of Venice, where she was made an honorary member of the Academy. Ultimately, however, the cosmopolitan couple decided to settle in Rome. Throughout her life she continued to move in aristocratic circles while also associating with such members of the educated elite as Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Kauffmann’s husband died in 1795; despite increasing health problems, she continued to work assiduously up to her death in 1807.

As for many artists at the time, prints were an important visual resource for Angelika’s artmaking. In 1757 Johann Joseph Kauffmann was commissioned to decorate the new parish church in his birthplace Schwarzenberg. He brought his 15-year-old daughter along and involved her in the project, which had a decisive influence on her subsequent work as a printmaker. She executed the cycle of the Apostles in Baroque style on the walls of the nave beneath the ceiling. For that purpose, she used a series of engravings made in 1742 by Marco Alvise Pitteri as models, which in turn were based on Giovanni Battista Piazzetta’s oil paintings of the heads of the Apostles. That way, the black-and-white prints were effectively reversed back into coloured frescoes. These apostle portraits count among the extremely rare church frescoes painted by a female artist before 1800. In creating these, Kauffmann in essence broke gender barriers, and she continued to occasionally realise artworks for churches. In 1803, for example, she donated the new high altar painting for the church in Schwarzenberg. Her practical experience working with printed models that were themselves based on paintings underscored that prints could play a powerful role in the dissemination of her own visual ideas.⁵

Etchings and Single-Figure History Paintings

Between 1762 and 1779, Kauffmann made around forty etchings in which she focused on individual portraits, allegories, or historical scenes.⁶ She was most likely introduced to the medium by Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein when the two met in Florence in 1762. An unsuccessful painter, Reiffenstein had gathered a certain reputation as the leading tour guide for prominent visitors to Rome. One of Kauffmann’s first etchings was a portrait of him made in 1763 which already shows how quickly she had perfected the technique.

The success of her painted portraits encouraged her to also reproduce them as etchings. In 1764, she had painted the oil portrait of the archaeologist and art historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann which became an instant sensation.⁷ Contemporaries extolled it as a vivid and faithful likeness. Winckelmann himself was delighted and commissioned her to make a print that could be used as frontispiece for one of his books. Kauffmann took care not to reverse the image in print.⁸ She shows Winckelmann writing in a book that rests on an ancient relief depicting the Three Graces. The caption beneath the portrait mentions Winckelmann’s position as prefect of antiquities in the Papal State and librarian of Greek literature in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Since the original idea of the print being used as a frontispiece was ultimately abandoned, it was printed only in a small edition and given to friends as a gift.⁹

The portraits of Reiffenstein and Winckelmann laid the ground for Kauffmann to expand her printmaking to other genres, and here especially to history painting, the pre-eminent art form at the time. As models for her etchings Kauffmann initially chose works by prominent Italian artists, undoubtedly also in the hope that the admiration their work enjoyed would reflect on her own works and boost sales of her prints. For example, in 1763/64 she etched The Mystical Marriage of St Catherine after a painting by Antonio Allegri da Correggio from the Farnese Collection in Naples.¹⁰ Yet her etching was hardly an exact reproduction of the original composition. Instead, she took the liberty to make considerable changes. Reversing the orientation of the image, she chose the horizontal landscape format for her etching, thereby reducing the Virgin, the Infant Jesus and St Catherine to half-length figures and setting them against a different background. The main focus now lies on the play of the hands, which are grouped around an empty space.

This etching is a good example of her history prints, which radiate serenity and are largely free of any dramatic action. The faces are more reminiscent of idealised portraits and hands will continue to play a prominent role in many of Kauffmann’s works. That is equally true of her portraits. Kauffmann was also instrumental in the development of the subgenre of single-figure history painting in Rome in the 1760s, with her own paintings exclusively featuring female heroines. The pensive woman sitting on her own effectively became the leitmotif of her art and many of her prints, too, are variations on this pictorial theme. A good example is Woman Plaiting Her Hair, an etching she made in Bologna in 1765.¹¹ The woman has averted her face and sits with the right side of her body facing the viewer. Since her features are not visible, her hands assume greater significance as an expression of her character.

A pose such as this invites viewers of both her prints as well as her paintings to develop their own associations. The woman sitting and plaiting her hair becomes a foil on which to project one’s own personal thoughts and sensations. In contrast to traditional history pieces, her single-figure compositions contain no references to mythology, literature, or historical events and are devoid of any action. They remain quiet and timeless. They also don’t require a classical education to be understood and instead allow viewers to engage with the images directly. This involvement of the beholder was new and contributed considerably to the establishment of Kauffmann’s place in art history.¹²

Different States and Reproductions of Kauffmann’s Works in Printmaking and Other Media

Kauffmann usually based her etchings on preliminary drawings and printed the plate while still reworking certain details, thereby producing different states. The scarcity of any early impressions is an indication that only very few prints were pulled from those earliest states – as we have seen already with her portrait of Winckelmann. Sizeable editions were only printed from the final state and their sales were encouraged by advertising.¹³ It was with larger editions in mind that Kauffmann had two etchings reworked in London by Giuseppe Carlo Zucchi, her later brother-in-law.

A truly wider dissemination of her prints only began thanks to the London printmaker and publisher John Boydell, who reworked the original plates in either 1781 or one year earlier when Kauffmann was still living in the British capital. She had sold the plates to Boydell who added aquatint to many of them, both offsetting the deterioration of impressions and no doubt also accommodating public taste. He altered the 1764 portrait of Winckelmann, for example, by making his hair fuller and giving him dark glowing eyes.¹⁴ In this way, Boydell transformed the portrait of a contemplative scholar into that of an energetic youth one could associate with the Sturm und Drang period.¹⁵ Boydell further enhanced the plates by printing them in colour, either in reddish-brown or in grey. After Boydell’s death in 1804, John Peter Thompson reissued the etchings one more time. By then, however, it was barely possible to conceal their wear, making the Thompson edition easily recognisable by the weakness of its impressions.

Despite Kauffmann’s own accomplishments as a printmaker, the greatest importance for her presence in the public realm were the prints made by other professional reproductive engravers after her paintings and drawings, most notably the reproductive engravers and publishers William Wynne Ryland after 1769 and Francesco Bartolozzi after 1783, both of whom were active in London. Kauffmann’s art was also reproduced in other European countries, albeit in far smaller numbers, so that the English market remained a significant factor even after she had settled in Italy. All told, over 600 reproductions were probably made after her original designs in all manner of printmaking techniques.¹⁶ Kauffmann astutely embraced the potential of the print market, which by the later eighteenth century offered commercial encouragement for the artistic production and aided the reputation of the prominent painters, both male and female. That is true for her reputation as well as for her income, given that she sold paintings for reproductive printmaking straight to print publishers.¹⁷ The circulation of her work through reproductive prints facilitated widespread appropriation of her images and motifs in other media, including ceramics, tobacco tins, fans, gowns, furniture, and wall coverings. As a result, her pictorial inventions were literally omnipresent.

Marie Ellenrieder

Life and Career as a Nazarene Artist

Similar to Kauffmann’s printmaking, Marie Ellenrieder’s graphic oeuvre was both translational, when it was based on her own models or the work of other artists, and autonomous, when it was designed specifically for the printed medium. Born in Konstanz on Lake Constance in 1791, she was the fourth daughter of Konrad Ellenrieder, a watchmaker at the court of the local Prince-Bishop. Her mother Maria Anna, née Hermann, came from a family of artists and in all likelihood encouraged the artistic talent of her daughter. When she was about 19 years old, Ellenrieder began an apprenticeship with the miniaturist Joseph Bernhard Einsle. Her long-standing patron Ignaz Heinrich Freiherr von Wessenberg, Vicar General of Konstanz, reached out to Johann Peter Langer, the director of the Munich Academy of Art, and thus facilitated Ellenrieder’s admission in 1813. She was thus the first woman in a German-speaking country to enrol at an academy of art.¹⁸ She completed her studies at the end of 1816.

Like Kauffmann, Ellenrieder specialised in portraiture and history painting and from 1818 worked at various royal courts in south-west Germany. In 1820, Wessenberg secured commissions for her to paint three altarpieces from the parish of Ichenheim near Offenburg. This set Ellenrieder’s path to religious painting which would become the core of her artistic endeavours. She was later in such demand that she could not accept all the church-related projects offered to her.¹⁹ In a certain way, Ellenrieder, who might have known Kauffman’s high altar in Schwarzenberg, essentially continued with her Nazarene altarpieces where the older artist had left off in the years around 1800.²⁰

In October 1822, Ellenrieder undertook a journey to Italy to study the art of the Old Masters. Upon her arrival in Rome, she was welcomed by her friend Katharina von Predl. They had met at the Academy of Art in Munich, where Predl had been a student since 1816. Predl introduced Ellenrieder to Louise Seidler who, equipped with a recommendation from Goethe, had also trained at the Munich Academy in 1817–1818. Seidler, in turn, provided her with an entry into the colony of Nazarene artists living in Rome. Ellenrieder shared the Nazarenes’ ideal of a religious art that drew on Raphael and Albrecht Dürer and the Italian and German artists who preceded them. In 1827, two years after her return to Germany, Ellenrieder was commissioned by the Grand Duke of Baden to make the painting for the high altar of the Church of St Stephen in Karlsruhe which she completed in 1831. Another major commission was to decorate the chapel at Langenstein Castle near Konstanz where, between 1828 and 1834, Ellenrieder drew three large New Testament scenes in black chalk and shades of pastel straight onto the church walls; their appearance is reminiscent of prints. Unlike Kauffmann, she never mastered the art of fresco painting and had evidently no desire to apply colour paintings a secco to plaster. This explains her unorthodox choice of technique for an architectural (church) environment.²¹

Ellenrieder received many honours, among them the Gold Medal of the Badischer Kunstverein in 1827. Her appointment as court painter in Baden in 1829 ensured her a regular income and a life in security. Nevertheless, she was plagued by constant self-doubt.²² In vain, she hoped to find renewed inspiration during a second visit in Italy from 1838 to 1840. Her insecurities did not detract from her success, however. Queen Victoria, for example, bought two paintings for her summer home at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. When Ellenrieder died in her native city of Konstanz in 1863, her altarpieces, placed in churches throughout the Baden region and extensively replicated, had contributed considerably to the wider recognition of Nazarene art as an important aspect of German Romanticism.

Experiences with Etchings and Lithographs

Ellenrieder made some thirty prints in the early part of her career between 1813 and 1826.²³ During her first year as a student in Munich she attended a printmaking class given by Carl Ernst Christoph Heß, who taught her his characteristic etching style of cross-hatching adapted from engraving. The result was a painterly effect reminiscent of the chiaroscuro in Rembrandt’s works. In addition to religious scenes, Ellenrieder made portraits, initially after works by other artists. She reproduced Rembrandt’s etched portrait of the goldsmith Jan Lutma as a lithograph, for instance.²⁴ Her experiments with the comparatively new technique of lithography testify to her willingness to try out everything the Academy had to offer. Her choice of an etching by Rembrandt as a model also shows her ongoing stylistic and thematic exploration of seventeenth-century Dutch art. She dedicated the lithograph to her father on his name-day in 1815, which was suitable since he was in the same age as Lutma when depicted by Rembrandt and both were excellent artist craftsmen.

Ellenrieder also translated some of her most successful paintings into prints. This frequently involved executing meticulous preliminary drawings which she then transferred onto the plate. Among her portrait prints is that of her mentor Wessenberg, which she etched in an oval format in 1819.²⁵ In keeping with the ideas of the Biedermeier period, the reformist theologian is dressed in modest attire and with no indication of the prominent position he held within the church hierarchy. As many as three studies have survived for a print of the winegrower Georg Lerch, a man of the people, whose portrait Ellenrieder etched in 1820.²⁶ Frail at 101 years of age and simply dressed, the old man sits on a stool, his alert eyes turned towards the observer while his fine long hair underscores his fragility. Although her portrayals of children, such as the Infant Jesus or putti, are more generally lauded for their sensitivity, these less-acclaimed reproductions of old people are no less moving.

In 1826, she made an etching after Mary Holding the Hand of the Infant Jesus (Figure 4.1) which she had painted two years earlier in Italy. She kept the painting throughout her life as a devotional image for herself.²⁷ A replica adorned an altarpiece in the Catholic parish church of St Eberhard in Stuttgart. The composition emulates Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. The curtains have been drawn back and attached to the columns to allow Mary to descend the steps from the heavenly sphere while holding the hand of the blessing Infant Jesus. The scene also alludes to the iconography of the presentation of the Virgin at the temple even if the latter traditionally shows Mary ascending the stairs. Wessenberg praised Ellenrieder’s painting on several occasions. In his book The Christian Images, he included a chapter on the Madonna and Child, at the end of which – following a long list of works by such illustrious artists as Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo – he explicitly mentions Ellenrieder.²⁸ He lauded her ‘very distinctive’²⁹ composition in which Jesus is portrayed as ‘sublime, independent and divine’.³⁰ What Wessenberg failed to acknowledge was that Ellenrieder may well have been inspired by medieval depictions of the Infantia Christi. Gothic glass paintings, for example, show Mary taking a reluctant Jesus by the hand to attend lessons in the synagogue.³¹ In her diary, the artist wrote about how she felt ‘when etching my Madonna. I began in the name of God and everything seemed to be fine. Then, trusting in God’s assistance, I poured the nitric acid and things turned out more or less as I wanted’.³²

Figure 4.1 Marie Ellenrieder, Mary Holding the Hand of the Infant Jesus, 1826.

Etching and drypoint, 17.8 × 11.7 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (inv. 235.75-1885).

Impact and Success

Ellenrieder’s works from the 1820s and 1830s attracted so much attention that publishers had them reproduced as lithographs, copper engravings, and steel engravings.³³ Later in her life, Ellenrieder would even make designs that were specifically intended for devotional prints. The brothers Karl and Nikolaus Benziger in Einsiedeln, a traditional centre of Catholicism in Switzerland, published them for a whole range of different occasions. The motifs exemplify an important aspect of popular piety but are, especially to our modern eye, often cloying. Not surprisingly, they did little to enhance the artist’s posthumous reputation.

During Ellenrieder’s lifetime, however, the popularity of the etchings she made after her own paintings was such that the published editions proved inadequate to satisfy the public demand. This led to the unusual situation whereby new plates were made not just after her paintings but also after her prints in order to facilitate further circulation. These sheets were consequently the outcome of a transfer from one printmaking medium to another, for example the prints after her much-admired painting Mary Holding the Hand of the Infant Jesus.

In 1832, Valentin Schertle made a large lithograph after the painting, which served as the annual gift to the members of the Badischer Kunstverein for the year 1833. His print was a very precise reproduction of the painting which was actually sent to him in Munich expressly for this purpose. The lithograph was used, in turn, as the design for other reproductive prints, for instance the two lithographs by Jakob Melcher and Gottlieb Bodmer, who had also produced a lithograph after the Sistine Madonna in 1829. After Ellenrieder’s painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1835, Adolphe Lafosse made a coloured lithograph which Joseph Lemercier printed in 1839. This new technique of chromolithography had been invented just two years earlier. As a result, the German artist enjoyed considerable success in Paris. This chain of reproductions further continued with the lithograph after Ellenrieder’s painting then used as the design for a much smaller steel engraving made by Hermann Pinhas around 1844. This served inter alia as the frontispiece in the Catholic hymn and prayer book for the archdiocese of Freiburg im Breisgau. Whereas the ubiquity of Kauffmann’s pictorial motifs manifested itself primarily in the decorative arts, Ellenrieder’s images were channelled into mass publications for religious believers.

Maria Katharina Prestel

Maria Katharina and Johann Gottlieb Prestel’s Business

In contrast to Kauffmann and Ellenrieder, Maria Katharina Prestel worked only as a printmaker. For the most part she reproduced drawings by other artists, thereby carving out a unique niche for herself in the world of German art. Maria Katharina Höll was born in Nuremberg in 1747. The Höll family, who belonged to the imperial city’s wealthy patriciate, enjoyed a financial means which enabled Maria Katharina and her younger sister to be given an artistic education. She received her first lessons in drawing and miniature painting at the age of thirteen. After 1769 her future husband, Johann Gottlieb Prestel, who was born in 1739, also taught her to paint in oils, draw in pastels and handle various printmaking techniques. He was a renowned artist by that time, having enjoyed great success in Italy between 1762 and 1769. The couple married in 1772 and began a collaborative business establishing a combined printmaking studio, publishing house, and art dealer’s shop.

They specialised in meticulously executed reproductive prints of drawings, many kept in private collections and therefore not accessible to a wider public. In recognition of the great acclaim their work enjoyed, Johann Gottlieb Prestel was appointed to teach at the Düsseldorf Academy. The couple’s earnings from the studio and Johann Gottlieb’s teaching position remained modest, however, which led Maria Katharina to leave Nuremberg in pursuit of more lucrative markets, despite the fact that the city was a good printmaking and distribution centre.

In 1782, she moved to Frankfurt am Main, where she was joined a year later by her husband and their four children. Since the family’s financial position in the renowned city of trade fairs continued to remain precarious, the couple decided to work at two separate locations. In 1786, Maria Katharina Prestel went to London which was, as we have already seen with Kauffmann, a vibrant marketplace for artworks, including prints. Maria Katharina worked as a reproductive printmaker for John Boydell and the publishing house of Molteno, Colnaghi & Co., concentrating on the reproduction of paintings. Once her financial position improved, she brought her two youngest children over and was able to help to support the rest of the family in Frankfurt. She died in 1794 at the age of just 46; her husband died fourteen years later in 1808.

The ‘Prestel Prints’

The Prestels’ reproductions were highly sophisticated. The name Prestel even became synonymous with this type of faithful copying of drawings. The dominant technique they used was aquatint, which they then combined with crayon manner and stipple engraving. They continuously experimented not only with the different techniques but also through the use of different papers and by printing in colour. They were the first in Germany to use multiplate printing processes. Mimicking their models, the prints were usually trimmed and adhered to mounts in the same way that collectors presented their drawings, with the name of the artist and title of the sheet added on separate labels. Some of their prints were so large in size that they required special plates and presses. After pulling 100 to 160 impressions, the plates were cancelled to ensure their quality and rule out any later reprints that might have compromised the market value of their products.³⁴ Between 1776 and 1785 they jointly issued three portfolios, to which Maria Katharina Prestel contributed just as many prints as her husband. Both Johann Gottlieb and Maria Katharina signed their works, thus making clear who created which plate since they both worked in the same style. Of the ninety-six prints signed by Maria Katharina, only four were after her own designs.³⁵

Perhaps her most famous print is a reproduction of the allegorical drawing The Triumph of Truth over Envy by Jacopo Ligozzi.³⁶ The original by Ligozzi is executed in pen and ink with brown wash on prepared brown paper and gold heightening. Maria Katharina Prestel’s reproduction of 1781³⁷ is printed from three plates: an etched plate that delineates the outlines of the composition in black, a very fine-grained aquatint plate that creates the tonal values in brown, and an additional line plate printed with an ochre-toned ink with sufficient tackiness for the application of gold dust to replicate the gold heightening of Ligozzi’s original.

It is noticeable, however, that Prestel also takes liberties with regards to her much-vaunted reproductive precision. She reproduced the drawing in reverse and omitted to indicate the squaring laid over the drawing in white chalk, evidently not wishing to impair the overall effect. On the other hand, she paid close attention to the recreation of the material structure by using printmaking methods to render a tear in the lower margin. Overall, the chiaroscuro effect is more dramatic in the print as compared with the drawing, owing to the rich contrasts provided by the various aquatint tones – an effect that is fully in keeping with the content of the scene,³⁸ making the print not a facsimile but an interpretative reproduction in its own right.

Conclusions

Kauffmann and Ellenrieder, who were mainly painters and worked for both aristocracy and church, enjoyed greater success than Prestel, whose translational prints were primarily intended for the bourgeois art market. Printmaking as a form of artistic expression was nonetheless important for all three artists. The possibilities that the graphic medium offered, be it as based on the artists’ own inventions or as a graphic translation of other artists’ work, allowed a wider dissemination of each artist’s name and fame and also brought the promise of commercial success. As we have seen in the case of Ellenrieder, some of these graphic translations proved to be so popular that they themselves became models for prints in different sizes and media to satisfy the huge demand. Ultimately, all three artists, to varying degrees, managed to receive international recognition.

During the nineteenth century, art historians paid tribute to their printed oeuvres by incorporating catalogues of their works in large art encyclopaedias. The catalogue of Prestel’s works appeared as early as 1842,³⁹ of Ellenrieder’s in 1870,⁴⁰ and of Kauffmann’s in 1878.⁴¹ The gender constraints rooted in social structures remained, nonetheless, unaltered. For example, it was Prestel’s husband, Johann Gottlieb, who was appointed to teach at the Academy in Düsseldorf, and not Maria Katharina, despite the fact that they ran their studio and publishing house jointly.

In the period that followed, interest in the artists’ work declined for various reasons. The advent of photography steadily eroded the influence of reproductive printmaking and Prestel’s work fell into oblivion. In the case of Ellenrieder and Kauffmann, reservations about printmaking as a medium were compounded by changing taste. Ellenrieder’s art went out of fashion along with the Catholicism of the Nazarenes, which was now seen as kitschy. Kauffmann’s Neoclassicism was criticised as being too feminine and excessively sentimental.⁴² Only over the last decades have these judgements been revised. First came the reappraisal of Kauffmann’s oeuvre, which is now regularly acknowledged for its central position within the international Neoclassicist movement, emphasising the pivotal role Kauffmann herself played for Italy and the north of Europe. More recently, the art of the Nazarenes and the creative achievements of the printmakers are also being viewed in a more positive light. The long-neglected prints of the three female artists can provide new insights into Neoclassicism, Nazarene art, and translational printmaking. Their respective oeuvres encompass individual approaches which reflect different treatments of essential aspects of the art of their time.