Kauffman, Tschudi, Riley and Bourgeois: four women who pushed the boundaries of printmaking

In the 18th and 19th centuries, printmaking was one of the few artistic mediums open to women who wanted to pursue an education in the arts. Refined enough for Queen Victoria, who had a printing press installed at Buckingham Palace, and for Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour (who revealed herself to be a first-rate engraver), printmaking afforded women the opportunity to experiment with various techniques while maintaining their social standing. As a result, many radical innovations in printmaking were made by female artists, and this continued in later generations.

Ahead of our London sales of Old Master Prints (until 21 March), Prints and Multiples (until 27 March) and Contemporary Edition: London (18 March to 1 April), we present a selection of prints by four highly skilled artists who forged a path in printmaking.

Angelica Kauffman, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, circa 1762-70

In the 18th century, printmaking was a useful way for artists to advertise their talents to a wide audience. The accomplished painter and etcher Angelica Kauffman published books of her etchings to promote herself to clients. Born in Chur, Switzerland, in 1741, and apprenticed to her father, the muralist and painter Joseph Johann Kauffmann, Angelica moved with her family to Italy in the late 1750s, where she studied the Old Masters. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (‘Madonna della Pappa’) is an etching based on a painting by Francesco Vanni, and is thought to have been made while Kauffman was living in Florence.

In the mid-1760s, success impelled the young artist to Britain in search of wealthy patrons. It was a canny decision: she was soon rivalling Sir Joshua Reynolds for commissions. By the 1770s, Georgian London was, according to one critic, ‘Angelicamad’ for the ‘luminous wonder’, and she secured invitations to paint Princess Augusta and Queen Charlotte. Soon after, she became a founder member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, one of only two women to do so.

Printing was not just a means to an end for the artist: Kauffman also used the medium to gently subvert the status quo, illustrating scenes from poems and classical mythology in which she would reimagine the male role as a woman’s.

Lill Tschudi, Parisian Café, 1939

Lill Tschudi’s prints of everyday life are as angular and dynamic as a Futurist painting. A pioneering artist in the world of linocut, she became a master of the medium, finding in the spare, graphic style a way of conveying motion, risk and exhilaration all at once. It is no surprise that she was often commissioned to illustrate sporting events.

Born in Schwanden, Switzerland, in 1911, she was sent to London to train under Claude Flight at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in 1929. The Vorticist-inspired printmaker taught Tschudi how to compress vehicles, emphasise curves and adopt a bird’s-eye perspective to convey the hurtling speed of the modern world. Parisian Café, from 1939, is just such a scene. The picture slants very slightly to the right, giving a sense of movement, as if the entire image is trying to catch up with itself.

It would be natural to assume that Tschudi was as fast-paced as her pictures — certainly, her prints of jazz bars and music halls seem to vibrate with the rhythmic pulse of a bass drum. Yet, in fact, the artist lived a relatively quiet existence, sharing a studio with her sister in Schwanden, and preferring the peace of the mountains to the frenzy of the metropolis.

Bridget Riley, Untitled (Based on Movement in Squares), 1962

Printmaking has always been a key part of Bridget Riley’s practice, dating back to those astonishing monochrome stripe paintings of her early career that seemed to hum with static electricity. She likes the democratic nature of print and how, in the early 1960s, it chimed with Pop art’s focus on industrial reproduction.

Riley made her first prints in 1961, and before long was experimenting with unconventional materials to find different ways of manipulating the play of light on the surface of her works. In the early 1960s, she pioneered the use of Plexiglass in printing, delighting in the way the translucent plastic distorted the image. In a 1992 interview, Riley acknowledged the experimental nature of her work, but hoped people were prepared to ‘cross the threshold’ to experience it. ‘Once on the other side, I believe that it isn’t so uncomfortable,’ she said, ‘that in fact you can move around in these paintings, that you can inhabit them and that you can enjoy the spaces and places that are built there.’

Untitled (Based on Movement in Squares) was inspired by a trip to Venice, where the artist watched rainwater fall on the black and white tiles of a piazza, observing how the pattern changed as the water evaporated.

Louise Bourgeois, Homely Girl, a Life, 1992

Louise Bourgeois once said that printmaking was about physicality — you needed good biceps to hammer letterpress type into lead with a mallet. She considered the process to be cathartic, explaining that it helped get rid of ‘unpleasant feelings’.

As a Surrealist, Bourgeois adopted an approach to etching that was bound up in the psychological experience of the process. ‘You try and you try… suddenly it gets there. I didn’t know that it would turn out that way. It is a mystery,’ she admitted. The images that emerged were — just like Henri Michaux’s mescaline drawings and Surrealism’s adoption of automatism — a way of uncovering the depths of one’s unconscious or, as Bourgeois described it, ‘etching life out of the blackness’.

In the early 1990s, Bourgeois was invited to illustrate Homely Girl, a short story by Arthur Miller about a woman struggling to find her place in the world. Bourgeois produced two volumes, the first of which featured a set of etchings based on delicate ballpoint-pen sketches of flowers and plants. The artist said the drawings related to the knowledge that life regenerates — that although flowers may die, they will emerge again.

Spanning five centuries of printmaking, this season’s Prints and Multiples auctions are on view at Christie’s in London from 13 March 2025. Old Master Prints is live for bidding until 21 March, Prints and Multiples until 27 March, and Contemporary Edition: London from 18 March to 1 April