market (Smentek, 2007, 223–224).
The print market was aided by a lively culture of collecting. The trade in England flourished as the
subscription system, which invited prospective buyers to pledge money before printing took place,
appealed to a growing number of virtuosi and connoisseurs (Clayton, 1997, 49–74). Marcia Pointon has
examined the significance of portrait print collections, a means of classifying wellknown historical
portrait subjects according to a respectable social order. The pastime was driven by a personal
commitment to developing as complete a collection as possible (Pointon, 1993, 57–67). Such collections
were often bound in volumes of mounted prints in which spaces were left for buyers’ own purchases, a
fashion established by James Granger. As well as being highly saleable, these satisfied a need for an
ordered history of the British nation and catered for collectors’ desires to place themselves imaginatively
in such a context. Print collections represented a distinctive epistemology or approach to the acquisition
of knowledge appropriate to the classificatory mentality of Enlightenment scholarly and scientific
investigation. Like other specialist collections, they presented a modern equivalent of the cabinets of
curiosities popular from the previous century in which virtuosi included a wide diversity of artifacts and
natural history specimens, but their objects were less randomly and more purposefully assembled (Scott,
1995, 166–167; Brewer, 1997, 253–256).
Many artists benefited from the production of original print designs, or from the sale of prints based on
their paintings. Reynolds was among many who displayed prints in order to advertise their work in other
media (Hallett, 2014, 20). Print auctions, often advertised in the press, were held in coffee houses and
print shops, and spread increasingly to the provinces (Clayton, 1997, 222). Large public dealerships in
prints, such as those run by Joseph Ryland, John Boydell and Robert Sayer (1725–1794), all of whom
sold prints of works by Angelica Kauffman as well as other celebrated eighteenthcentury British artists,
became more important than smaller independent dealers (Alexander, 1992, 142). Engravers normally
worked directly for printsellers rather than for artists, while having regular contact with the latter. Some
engravers, such as Johann Georg Wille, JacquesPhilippe Le Bas (1707–1783), various generations of
the Audran family, Robert Strange (1721–1792) and William Woollett (1735–1785), became so skilful,
that their technical expertise tested the boundaries with “fine” art (Clayton, 1997, xi, 105). Excluded from
full membership of the Royal Academy in London, engravers were given there the status of “associate
engraver.” Gillray’s prints reveal a familiarity with the conventions of the “higher” genre of history
learned through study at the Royal Academy’s schools. Artists such as Piranesi became keen to design
their own prints so that their individual styles became prominent (Clayton, 1997, 225–229; Campbell,
2000, 561). At the French Académie royale, engravers and graphic artists were officially excluded from
academic areas of study but could exhibit at the Salons and were taken seriously by critics.
Artists were often commissioned by particular dealers to produce designs, and the print run of the most
popular might amount to hundreds or thousands of copies, many being reissued at a later date, sometimes
as part of a portfolio or album collection that could be sold or hired out. Printsellers could also make a
living through importing or exporting prints or through buying and selling on a wholesale basis (Donald,
1996, 4). They often specialized in products for a particular market, fashion or section of society. By the
middle of the century, printsellers might specialize in any of the following types or subjects: old master
prints, literary subjects, views, antiquities, book illustration, battle scenes, marine or coastal views,
landscapes, picturesque scenes, historical figures and events, architecture and book illustration (Clayton,
1997, 105–128). Caricature prints popular in the last few decades of the century were a specialist
commercial genre, some focusing on bawdy, anticlerical (and often antiCatholic) subjects, while
others chose to focus on more sophisticated topics. In London, comic prints and caricatures were sold
mainly in the east end, to tradesmen and artisans, before spreading westwards as they became more
fashionable with the upper echelons of society. Boydell was a market leader in the sale of prints of old