Frontispiece Design for Bell’s Poets of Great Britain, Lyttleton

Download2570 × 4000 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807)
Medium: Graphite, pen and gray ink, gray and brown wash, heightened with white
Size: 10.8 × 7 cm (4 1/4 × 2 3/4 in.)
Culture: Austrian
Museum: J. Paul Getty Museum
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

This is one of three small-scale designs (see also 2026.24.1 and 2026.24.3) created in preparation for engravings by the Neoclassical artist Angelica Kauffman. The engravings were executed by leading commercial printmakers of the time (and Kauffman’s frequent collaborators), Francesco Bartolozzi (1728–1815) and Jean Marie Delattre (1746–1840), for publication as frontispieces in John Bell’s 109-volume literature-for-the-masses pocket book series The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill. Of the artists who designed frontispieces for the series, Kauffman was the only woman. It is likely that the drawings were followed by more refined modelli executed in black dry media, which Kauffman then shared with her printmakers.

Each frontispiece follows the same format: a scene illustrating a poem is contained within a roundel, above it, a cartouche is left for the name of the poet, while a second cartouche below contains lines of the poem being illustrated. This sheet illustrates a line from The Progress of Love by George, Lord Lyttleton and shows the shepherd Damon, abandoning his flock to contemplate his love.

Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.