Lieke van Deinsen is nwo postdoctoral research fellow at ku Leuven and vu Amsterdam, where she conducts research on the visual representations of female authorship and authority in the early modern Low Countries. In 2017 she completed her PhD on eighteenth-century processes of literary canon formation (Literaire erflaters. Canonvorming in tijden van culturele crisis, Hilversum 2017). In the capacity of Johan Huizinga Fellow she has published The Panpoëticon Batavûm. The Portrait of the Author as a Celebrity (Amsterdam 2016). Beatrijs Vanacker is fwo postdoctoral fellow at ku Leuven, where she conducts research on the transnational spread of the novel in the eighteenth century, with a focus on translation and women writers. She wrote Altérité et identité dans les 'histoires anglaises' au xviii e siècle (Leiden 2016) and has published widely on the novel and cultural identity formation in the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century women's writing (Riccoboni, Haywood, and Leprince de Beaumont), and literary translation.
This article discusses printed author portraits of women writers as vehicles of public image in the male-dominated eighteenth-century book market. It shows how Dutch women writers responded to the growing demand for author portraits and used their portrait engravings to shape their public image. It proved to be a fine line between showcasing literary aspirations and maintaining female modesty.
When the famous Corsican patriot Pascal Paoli (1725-1807) visited the Dutch Republic in 1769 soon after his defeat at the hands of French invaders, he was given a hero’s welcome. Several printed portraits depicting Paoli, a symbol of true patriotism, were circulated and eagerly seized upon by the Dutch public. Perhaps the most striking of these likenesses was painted by the little-known French-born pastellist Susanne Caron (c. 1734-c. 1777) and shortly afterwards engraved in copper by the renowned engraver Jacobus Houbraken (1698-1770). Newspapers throughout Europe claimed this portrait was Paoli’s first ‘true likeness’. This article presents a previously unknown letter by Caron to professor Pieter Burman (1713-1778), the ideologist of the Dutch ‘patriotic’ faction, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the genesis of this remarkable portrait.
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