Angelika Kauffmann

Fluent in five languages and a virtuoso singer, Kauffman received an unusually broad, Classical education for a girl of her time. Recognizing her gift early on, Kauffmann’s father Joseph Johann Kauffmann, an artist from Austria, took her on a Grand Tour across Italy between 1758 and 1765. On this formative trip she absorbed the influence of Anton Raphael Mengs and Pompeo Batoni, making trend-setting portraits, among others, of English Grand Tourists such as John Parker (Saltram House, Plymouth), David Garrick (Burghley House, Samford) and the Marquis of Exeter. In Rome, age 22, her breakthrough came when she painted the antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1764; Kunsthaus, Zürich). The informality and intimacy with which she captured an illustrious sitter like Wincklemann is what got her name out early on.

Soon after her success in Rome, Kauffmann settled in London for fifteen years from 1766-81, during which she achieved fame and fortune. She became a key player in the development of Neoclassical taste in Britain. Not surprisingly, most of her extant works in English collections are in country houses, such as Saltram in Devon that owns 11 of her works. In the 1770s, Kauffmann expanded her repertoire of Classical subjects to include scenes from British literature, such as ‘Poor Maria’ from Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) (Burghley House Collection, Stamford). These allegorical subjects were typically painted on copperplates in small oval format. Adding to their immense popularity was the fact that prints were made after these works, sometimes even on porcelain and pendants, and circulated all over Europe. Towards the end of her stay in London, Kauffmann was celebrated as a ‘living muse’ in a group portrait of distinguished women, and she painted four ceilings in the Royal Academy’s rooms at the New Somerset House. Her accomplishments are all the more significant, considering the drama in her personal life: she was tricked into marrying a bigamous phony aristocrat. Following a divorce, in 1781 she remarried Antonio Zucchi, a painter from Venice, and relocated to Rome the following year.

Besides a few sojourns in Naples, Kauffmann lived and worked in Rome until her death in 1807. She ran a salon out of her studio-residence near the Spanish Steps that attracted celebrity writers, artists and dignitaries from all over the world. Casting herself as the real-life embodiment of the paragone between music and painting, Kauffmann and her guests played instruments, sang, and read poetry aloud to each other, often improvised at these ‘conversazione’. Kauffmann’s artistic talents, combined with business acumen and a powerful network propelled her success into unprecedented realms for a woman artist. In the 1780s, she was the leading painter in Rome. Her late style looks at Guercino and Reni, but synthesizes elements of Roman, Venetian, French and English painting. Her  art collection focused on 16^th and 17^thcentury paintings, such as those by Paris Bordone and Titian, in addition to works attributed to Van Dyck, Veronese and Leonardo Da Vinci.

In Edith Wharton’s 1924 novel False Dawn, set in 1840 New York, the protagonist was sent by his father on a Grand Tour of Italy to buy art, only to find his choice of Angelica (instead of Angelico – Fra Angelico) met with disappointment, arguably exacerbated by the fact that she was a woman. She fell out of fashion, as did Neoclassicism, and the reproduction of her work on furniture and decorative arts detracted from the seriousness of her reputation. Though she never entirely fell out of favor, when the American art historian Anthony M. Clark published an essay on Kauffmann and Rome in 1968, interest in Kauffmann has gained momentum in academic circles. Several recent exhibitions of Kauffmann in London, Germany and Switzerland have reestablished her position in history.❖