The Female Connoiseur 1772

This print, “The Female Connoisseur,” was made by Matthew Darly in 1777 using etching and possibly some hand-applied color. Darly was a printmaker catering to the London elite, who had developed a craze for collecting and dealing in art. What’s interesting here is that the artist's primary material, etching, becomes the subject of its own joke. The figure is a fashionable woman, a member of the leisure class, looking closely at a print through her eyeglasses. Her dress and bonnet, adorned with decorative frills and bows, display the patterns of consumption that were part and parcel with the art market. Darly’s print, while seemingly lighthearted, touches on issues of labor and class that underpinned the production and consumption of art in 18th-century London. The print itself would have been made through a process of skilled labor, while the woman in the image represents the wealthy elite who had the time and resources to indulge in art collecting. Through his choice of subject, Darly blurs the lines between fine art and craft, inviting us to consider the social and economic context in which both were produced.