Often, when I see that a book comes directly out of a dissertation, there’s a sinking feeling that it may be arcane and academic in the extreme. The kind of book that’s filled with jargon and overly complicated syntax that makes it a slightly pointless slog. But sometimes, fortunately, there can be the kismet of an overlooked subject of the past meeting the contemporary world in a way that is electrifying. I’m thinking of books like Paris Spies-Gans’s A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 (2022), which sprang from her own dissertation and resulted in an exhaustive but lively examination of the past with a clarity that charts a rich path for the future. Art historian Esther Chadwick’s The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (2024) belongs in the same category.
A book about 18th-century printmaking — and that of the early 19th century, something not quite captured in the title — might not strike you as timely. But as Chadwick points out, the British printmakers she discusses actively dismantled power systems, sought to bridge the gap between the cultural elite and popular movements, both questioned and defended the necessity of colonialism, and explored the ethical relationship of past and present in their work. From the outset, Chadwick is completely transparent about what she means by the term “radical” in her title: “This book returns to a formative moment when art gained its energy from proximity to and engagement with forms of radical politics as they were emerging in a modern sense.” What results is exhilarating, both historically and visually.
In the hierarchy of European art before modernism, printmaking, like craft, had a decidedly secondary status. Chadwick points out that it was not until the rise of modernism around the turn of the 20th century that prints began to attain status as art forms in their own right. When London’s Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768, it “excluded engravers from full membership and access to its highest honours” and showed prints at its annual exhibitions in limited numbers, “a persistent source of tension.” It wasn’t until 1928 that engravers achieved equality with other artists in the Royal Academy. But being a bit on the periphery, The Radical Print evinces, can often allow for greater boldness and invention.
Chadwick examines in depth the work of five printmakers — James Barry, John Hamilton Mortimer, James Gillray, Thomas Bewick, and William Blake — in stand-alone chapters that can be read independently. All five subjects might be defined “as typifying the mythic figure (male-gendered) Romantic artist” for various reasons that Chadwick enumerates, few of them shared, though the printmakers do have in common meaningful connections with their artistic and political words while actively seeking to influence them. Prints, perhaps even more than paintings, carry a message. And as with painters, the hand of the printmaker reveals distinctive, idiosyncratic styles.
So while prints such as James Barry’s “The Phoenix, or the Resurrection of Freedom” (1776) use the staid visual language of neoclassical history painting to denounce “the tyranny of monarchy, heredity and privilege,” the exuberant polemic of a satirical work like James Gillray’s “The Apotheosis of Hoche” (1798) is fabulously unhinged. And while William Blake was famously eccentric, it’s amusing to read an account of John Hamilton Mortimer that describes him as a “fop, a rake, a bon-vivant, a reveller, an indiscreet, dissipated young man.” I mean, what’s not to like?
There is, in fact, much to like in The Radical Print, particularly the many illustrations of work that you’ve likely never seen before and would be difficult to track down online. These stunning reproductions could fuel the imagination of anyone making, say, politically minded work of any kind today. There is something about seeing work done for paper, on paper, that feels especially vivid.
With a lot of art historical detail and an academic focus, Chadwick’s book might seem an unlikely fit for the general reader — but because it concerns prints often intended for broad audiences, it has inherent accessibility. As much for artists as for scholars, The Radical Print might prove useful as both source material and inspiration. Take the example of William Blake, who Chadwick writes was “explicit about the prophetic role of the artist in his illuminated books.” In service of that role, Blake invented his own printmaking method, relief etching, which allowed him to integrate image and text on the same plate, a technique he used with gusto. While his illustrated poems are familiar, his annotated engraving of the classical statue of Laocoön and his sons is a revelation: “Echoing at a formal level the traditional engraver’s action of rotating the plate on a leather pad to manipulate the direction of the burin’s strokes, Blake surrounded the central image on all sides with a profusion of fragmentary and non-linear texts that condense his lifelong critique of commerce, empire and war.”
Blake’s work embodies what Chadwick’s book likewise proffers: “a useful way of thinking about what it means to be a radical, as a simultaneous turning back to the root, a grasping of the present and a reimagining of the future.”
The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (2024) by Esther Chadwick is published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and distributed by Yale University Press, and is available online and through independent booksellers.
