Esther Chadwick

Just as global politics shape culture today, late eighteenth-century Britain was marked by upheaval, from the American War of Independence to the French Revolution. In The Radical Print, Esther Chadwick examines how the art world responded between 1770 and 1830 through detailed studies of five printmakers: James Barry, John Hamilton Mortimer, James Gillray, Thomas Bewick, and William Blake.

At the time, the Royal Academy of Arts, founded in 1768, dominated British art but regarded printmaking as secondary and largely reproductive. Printmakers were excluded from full academic status, limited to drawing classes only. Chadwick challenges this hierarchy, demonstrating that British printmaking was inventive, experimental, and intellectually rigorous, with a deep engagement in contemporary politics.

Through works such as Barry’s The Phoenix (1776), Gillray’s political satires, Mortimer’s challenge to academic rationalism, Bewick’s role in secure banknote engraving, and Blake’s revolutionary visions, the book shows printmakers as more responsive to political and economic change than academic painters. Despite this, engravers were not granted equality within the Royal Academy until 1928.

Esther Chadwick, The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, 2024.