Francesca Kaes

Research Topic

The Art of Blotting: Alexander Cozens's New Method as Intermedial Practice

My thesis examines the intermedial relationship between painting and printmaking in late eighteenth-century British art and argues for the significance of prints to the advent of artistic modernity around 1800. Against a prevailing literature that tends to consider reproductive prints as derivative copies of painted originals, I argue that the two art forms interacted in complex and productive ways. In presenting a close reading of the work of British landscape artist Alexander Cozens (1717-1786), I show that interactions between painting and printmaking opened a space for artists and theorists to reflect upon the nature of artistic creation, originality, and invention. Analysing Cozens’s blots, prints, and watercolour paintings, I show that it is in the spacing of these media that one finds emerging a new and entirely modern conception of the image. 

My wider research interests include the theory of art and image-making, histories and methodologies of art history, including digital art history, and the intermedial relationship between painting and printmaking.

I hold a BA in European Art History and Classical Archaeology from Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg and an MA in Art and Visual History from Humboldt University Berlin. Before undertaking my DPhil, I was the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation Curatorial Intern in the Department of Modern Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2014/15), and the Anne Christopherson Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, London (2016). I also worked as a research associate at Culture Collaboratory, and since 10/2019 I have been the Graduate Projects Coordinator at the Humanities Division, University of Oxford. My research is supported by the AHRC, the Fund for Women Graduates, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Supervisor: Professor Geoffrey Batchen and Professor Hanneke Grootenboer