The chapter is dedicated to the active career of the eighteenth-century printseller Jane Hogarth, widow of the painter and engraver William Hogarth. It looks at the means Jane employed to face competitors, namely by turning to copyright law in an effort to protect her property. In doing so, she set an important precedent in copyright law, whereby she obtained a special provision that would grant her the exclusive right to sell her husband’s prints. Letters, newspaper advertisements, legal reports, and even satirical prints by contemporaries offer insight into Jane’s commercial dealings, her powers of persuasion and the impact of her achievements.

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?

Churchill’s art has remained marginal to the study of his legacy in the twentieth century and yet he was in correspondence with some of the most highly regarded painters of the period, and was successfully presented and reviewed. The chapter explores Churchill’s relationship with art: his encounter with painting, his mentors and influences, painting, politics and the tension between tradition and modernism in the art of his age, the reception of his works, and the question of the amateur versus the professional artist.

The patronage bestowed by British royalty on the arts in the twentieth century has been very little explored. This chapter looks at the most prominent examples of how the monarch, and senior members of the royal family, supported individual writers, artists, musicians, and performers up to the 1970s. A mere royal command or even just interest in a certain work can greatly increase the attention it receives and further its creator’s reputation and success. All the same, royal patronage in this period became a more formalised enterprise. In contrast to previous centuries, royal patronage concentrated more and more on professional organisations and distinct groups, rather than on selected individuals.