Les Graveuses en Taille-Douce: Professional Women Printmakers in Paris, 1660-1789

Though this dissertation offers the first in-depth sociohistorical analysis of French women printmakers of any era, I turn specifically to eighteenth-century Paris, where artists known as graveuses en taille-douce (female intaglio engravers) were particularly abundant. Each chapter delves into the lives and work of scores of professional graveuses en taille-douce who produced prints for profit, were considered skilled experts within their communities, and demonstrated ambition long before the end of the nineteenth century: the era most associated with women’s professionalization as artists in Europe. The assumptions about early modern women’s work challenged in this dissertation are numerous: that professional women artists were exceptional or anomalous; that women who did not publicly exhibit operated primarily from “the shadows”; and that women’s participation in the world of printmaking was always an endeavor of the mechanical or applied arts, never a liberal one. I argue that women printmakers, though they did not achieve the celebrity of the female members of the Royal Academy, nor did they publicly exhibit their work in significant ways, still claimed public, professional identities as artists by signing, selling, and circulating their work. Their prevalence, reputations, and positive reception demonstrates there were more avenues of success for women artists that fall outside what is traditionally associated with artistic achievement. This dissertation thus changes current understanding of how the art world operated during this period and offers a reconsideration of women’s place in Art History while simultaneously questioning how this history is written.Chapter One provides an overview of apprenticeships, the Parisian artists’ guild, and the Royal Academy to explore how women printmakers, though excluded from official modes of training and institutional membership, still procured an education and embarked on professional careers. Chapter Two utilizes three case studies to demonstrate how a graveuse en taille-douce might receive an education in her art. Chapter Three explores women’s diverse roles within family printmaking workshops and other print-related commercial enterprises. Chapter Four employs multiple case studies to make visible how even the most traditionally hierarchical relationships—that of father and daughter and husband and wife—were mutually beneficial within the family printmaking workshop.