The Metamorphosis of Maria Graham (1785-1842)

Maria Graham (1785-1842)—a white, middle-class Scottish woman—was the first woman author, and among the first of any author from Britain, to publish a travel book illustrated by prints after her own drawings. In total, she published sixteen books and pamphlets on an ambitious range of topics. An agentic producer of culture, her multifaceted career blurred the lines between amateurism and professionalism. Graham initially pursued drawing as a polite accomplishment, but her artistic practice became a vehicle for self-transformation. As an aesthetic space that accommodated a range of practitioners, the genre of landscape provided her with the necessary flexibility to expand upon her amateur drawing instruction and push beyond the aesthetic of the picturesque. In contrast to the assumed private nature of women’s amateur production, Graham distinguished herself by illustrating her own travel books, effectively merging the roles of travel artist and travel writer. This dissertation makes the claim that publication offered her an alternate route to professionalization alongside of and in addition to the public exhibition. Her landscape art may not have hung on the walls of the Royal Academy, but it nonetheless reached a wider public through her printed books.

This dissertation is the first art-historical investigation of Graham’s artistic practice, and the first that takes the breadth of her creative pursuits into account. Her parallel art and writing practices were mutually constitutive and shaped by travel. In her archive, however, there are moments of friction when image diverges from word. Each chapter attends to the tension between freedom and constraint by highlighting instances when she either worked within the gendered boundaries of British culture or when she strategically chose to cross them. I trace her metamorphosis from amateur to professional, the arc of which is reflected in the structure of the chapters. Graham took advantage of a moment of openness when the profession of the travel artist was in formation and therefore available to women despite the obstacles. Through her savvy navigation of cultural institutions and systems of representation, she constituted a new and complex artistic identity. Graham pioneered the role of the professional women travel artist and writer in the first part of the nineteenth century.