Matrices: Female Printmakers in Revolutionary France

Abstract

Matrices: Female Printmakers in Revolutionary France asserts the identities and artistic oeuvres of 286 women who worked professionally as printmakers in France between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. This dissertation marks the first dedicated study of French female printmakers of this period, and one of the few comprehensive studies of female printmakers at all, significantly broadening and honing understanding of French female printmakers and of their impact on the artistic, professional, and commercial worlds they operated within. Focused on political imagery, broadly defined, this dissertation foregrounds how female printmakers used print to participate in politics. Informed by hands-on experience printmaking, this dissertation also centers materials and technique of intaglio and lithographic print. In doing so, it proposes a new conceptual methodology – defined as a matrixial approach – to address how individual female printmakers navigated gender and politics. This matrixial methodology knits together deep archival research, social and political context, feminist, queer, and trans theory, and printmaking materiality to propose a way to address and navigate archival absences, particularly for artists or artworks that have been historically marginalized. Merging techniques of expansive archival research and critical fabulation, this dissertation reanimates these historical female printmakers and imagine how they navigated their artistic, gendered, and political identities – critically, through printmaking materials and process. Matrices argues that female artists found in printmaking the ability to work through gender as an identity, societal group, and political class. Female printmakers encountered, pushed upon, experimented within, and challenged print’s fluid conceptualization of gender to unsettle gender definitions and binaries in their social, professional, artistic, and political worlds. Their gender troublings, in this intense political moment, amounted to assertions and redefinitions of citizenship, which was constructed along gendered lines. Crafting a web – a matrix – of the archival, the material, and the theoretical, this dissertation elucidates how female artists encountered the entwined discourses of print and gender through their artistic processes. In the skilled manipulation of their materials, female printmakers found a way to navigate their gender and professional identities, to assert female agency and authorship, and to problematize the gender binaries and biases that circumscribed their participation in artistic and political spheres. Matrices: Female Printmakers in Revolutionary France is organized along two axes: chronologically and biographically. Moving chronologically from 1789 to 1848, each chapter centers on a particular political era and foregrounds three or four artists. Chapter 1, “Revolution, 1789-1799,” examines female artists of the first French Revolution, highlighting the work of engravers Angélique Allais Briceau and Emira Sergent Marceau and foregrounds how their work engaged with the body. Their engagement of print’s bodily nature to manipulate the human figure, Chapter 1 argues, constituted rethinkings of the Revolutionary ideal of republican motherhood in a reconceptualization of female citizenship. The massive reproductive print projects of the Napoleonic era – the Description de l’Égypte and Annales du Musée – are the focus of Chapter 2, “Empire: 1800-1815.” Female printmakers like Thérèse and Marguerite Lingée and Marie Pauline Soyer replicated paintings at the Salon, Napoleon’s plunder, and findings of his Egyptian campaign. Angélique Allais Briceau managed a workshop of female colorists that illuminated the engravings. Chapter 2 rethinks ‘reproductive’ print – prints that replicate another medium often seen as lesser and feminine – to argue how female printmakers promoted and troubled the Empire’s own politics of reproduction. The third chapter, “Restoration: 1815-1830,” reclaims female artists like Anne Emilie and Victorie Constance Bès’ and Joséphine Formentin’s role in the development of lithography, invented in 1796. Putting period anatomical and lithographic treatises in conversation, this chapter investigates the shared language of hypersensitivity within print and gender discourse and how it enabled female artists to problematize gender biases and in turn, ideas of artistic genius tied to the artist’s hand. Lithography’s ties to history preoccupy Chapter 4, “Revolution Again: 1830-1848,” focused on female lithographers like Joséphine Formentin, Cécile Marchand, and the Marie Marguerite Delpech who worked during the revolutionary moment of 1830. This chapter will explore how female lithographers used their medium’s privileged relationship time and history in conversation with a new gendered historical consciousness. Developing what I have termed an aesthetics of inscription, female lithographers experimented with lithography’s relationship to gendered history to inscribe women and themselves into history. The dissertation concludes with an appendix of the 286 female printmakers I have recorded in my research.