The sister arts are a curious and unstable collection of siblings. They are said to be daughters of Nature, a divine parent who endows them with mimetic features meant to enhance their mother’s beauty and charm their beholders. Since their birth, their job, if personified allegories can be said to work, has been to represent the relatedness of various cultural forms and practices. There have been many sisters, but the two who first entered the English language were Painting and Poetry. Others followed. In 1748, an English writing master suggested that drawing and penmanship – the purview of pencil and pen respectively – were sister arts (Bickham). Another half century later, the American Presbyterian minister John Blair Linn, in his 1802 poem The Powers of Genius, recommends that architecture be added to a list of sisters that include ‘Poetry, Painting, Statuary and Music’ (81). To understand the sisters’ importance in the period of British Romanticism is to recognise the seeds of something we might today call ‘interdisciplinarity’ or perhaps ‘transdisciplinarity’. To get there, we must invite the personified sisters to exit the realm of form. They properly belong to the realm of use. Despite their fine drapery, these allegories, in fact, work quite hard.

Imaginary as they may have been, the sister arts were deployed by real people trying to make a living. This chapter briefly addresses the history of the sister arts in order to frame a discussion of their political implications for Romantic-era cultural practitioners and for their print mediators, with a particular focus on the painter Angelica Kauffman. It will then open out into the broader issue of disciplinarity, which, as Jon Klancher and others have argued, is a legacy of Romantic-era professionalisation across the arts and sciences (Klancher 2013; Valenza 2009). By ‘cultural practitioner’ I mean people who make cultural objects. I use the word make rather than create because I am interested in skilled labour and in practices of the hand. Because of my own disciplinary commitments, I have little to say about most of the cast of sisters. My argument has less to do with music, dance, theatre, gardening, drawing, &c. – all sisters at one point or another – and more to do with painting and poetry.