While her career remains vastly understudied, the Anglo-Italian narrative and portrait painter Maria Cosway (1760–1838) reached rare levels of recognition for an artist of any sex during her life by exhibiting to regular acclaim at London’s Royal Academy from 1781 to 1801. In these same years, and after she ceased exhibiting, Cosway also consistently engaged with print – an aspect of her artistic practice that has yet to be the subject of sustained scholarly work.

This chapter offers an initial foray into understanding Cosway’s relationship with and steady pursuit of the printed medium. Above all, it emphasises the implicitly professional nature of her published endeavours – according to definitions of professionalism at the time – by highlighting her contributions to five artistic, didactic printed series executed in London and Paris. Why print, and why these projects? What did she see in the medium that she may not have found in her painting practice? How might gender have factored into these decisions and, vitally, into her works’ reception? After two decades in the public eye, what was at stake for Cosway – might she have used print to claim a discrete identity as an artistic professional?