The Art of Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721-1782)

The Art of Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721–1782) is the first English-language monograph on this exceptional German artist that critically examines Therbusch’s artworks and career as a history and mythological painter, portraitist, and maker of synthetic pigments within the German and international milieu that both condemned and celebrated her accomplishments. Adding to the excellent scholarship on French, British, Italian, and Swiss eighteenth-century women painters, this book showcases the social and cultural practices of court cultures beyond France, with a focus on German-speaking Europe and how a provocative woman painter navigated within them. Meticulous archival and literary research sheds new light on the importance of the family atelier as a place of networking, collaboration, and experimentation in the eighteenth century and provides a fresh perspective on the growing Prussian intellectual and mercantilist cultures and their impact on Therbusch’s artistic production and the unavoidable fluency between painting, the minor or luxury arts, and the laboratory. Therbusch's life and art enriches our understanding of female artistic agency and the complexities of pursuing a career in the male- and academy-dominated art world of the eighteenth century.

Lindeman Christina :

Christina K. Lindeman is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of South Alabama. Her research focuses on the art and material culture of eighteenth-century Germany. Her first book Representing Duchess Anna Amalia’s Bildung: A Visual Metamorphosis from Political to Personal in Eighteenth-Century Germany was published by Routledge in 2017. She has also contributed essays in Intimate Interiors: Sex, Politics, and Material Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Bedroom and Boudoir (2023), Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2015), Word and Image in the Eighteenth Century (2008), as well as published articles in Source (2013) and Journal 18 (2022).