Angelica Kauffman

(Switzerland, 30/10/1741 - 05/11/1807)

Born in Switzerland in 1741, Kauffman’s father, the Austrian painter Johann Joseph Kauffman, recognised her gifts early and became her first teacher, providing rigorous instruction in drawing and painting. The family’s frequent travels through Switzerland, Austria and Italy exposed her to a breadth of artistic traditions and developed her prodigious talent, and, by her teenage years, she had already began receiving commissions from members of the local nobility and clergy.

Fluent in several languages and educated in literature, music and philosophy, she initially intended to become an opera singer but chose visual art instead. Following her mother’s death in 1757, she moved to Milan with her father and travelled throughout Italy where she absorbed the influence of the classical ideals that would shape her later art. Often depicting herself in the guise of allegorical or historical figures, her self-portraits from this period reveal both her artistic confidence and her strategic self-fashioning as a learned, virtuous artist.

Moving to Florence in 1762, she was elected a member of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno and an honorary member of the Accademia Clementina di Bologna before travelling to Naples and Rome, where she was elected a member of the Accademia di San Luca in 1765.

The following year, Kauffman moved to London where she swiftly established herself within the city’s fashionable and intellectual elite. Her arrival coincided with a growing taste for Neoclassicism and moral narrative painting, genres in which she excelled, leading to her instantaneous success and, over the next 16 years, she exhibited regularly at the prestigious Royal Academy and worked for an array of aristocratic and royal patrons.

In 1768 she became one of only two female founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts, alongside Mary Moser, signalling both her extraordinary talent and the respect she commanded among her peers. She was frequently exhibited at the Academy’s annual shows and insisted that artistic achievement does not depend on gender but, rather, on intellect and discipline. The works she produced while in London came to adorn some of the city’s most important interiors, including commissions for Somerset House and the Royal Academy itself.

Her paintings of classical and historical subjects, often drawn from Greco-Roman mythology or from literature, embodied the ideals of virtue, sentiment and moral contemplation central to the Neoclassical movement. However, through these works, Kauffman challenged the conventions that restricted women’s artistic expression to portraiture or domestic subjects, asserting her authority within the most prestigious genre of painting.

In 1781, Kauffman returned to Rome, where she established a studio that became a mandatory destination for aristocratic travelers undertaking the Grand Tour and continued to receive prestigious commissions from across Europe, maintaining her position at the pinnacle of the international art world.

Image: Angelica Kauffman, Design (1780). Oil on canvas, 128.3 x 149 cm. Royal Academy of Arts, U.K.