Angelica Kauffmann

Swiss painter

• Born: October 30, 1741
• Birthplace: Chur, Swiss Confederation (now Switzerland)
• Died: November 5, 1807
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

Refusing to accept the traditional role for the woman artist as a painter of portraits or still lifes, Kauffmann instead became a history painter. An early exponent of neoclassicism, she produced some of the finest works in this style, which helped to popularize the movement throughout Europe.

Early Life

Angelica Kauffmann (ahng-GAY-lee-kah KOWF-mahn) was born in a small village in Switzerland in 1741, the daughter of a minor portraitist and painter of religious murals. She was a child prodigy who received her first commission at age eleven for a portrait of the bishop of Como. Recognizing their daughter’s talents, her parents made certain that she received a sound education in poetry, history, religion, languages, and the visual arts. She was also an accomplished musician with a remarkably good voice; indeed, while still very young, she was faced with a choice between a career in opera or one in art. Later, Kauffmann emphasized the importance of this difficult decision in a painting entitled The Artist Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting (1794), in which she appears between two allegorical female figures representing Music and Painting. Using gesture to indicate her choice, she looks with longing and regret at Music and squeezes her hand in farewell while making an open-handed sign of acceptance toward Painting.

Johann Kauffmann took his family to Milan in 1754 to further Angelica’s artistic training in the city’s many excellent galleries. There, she encountered for the first time the prejudice against women in the art world. Generally, women were allowed to work in the galleries only under the patronage of some important man. Legend has it that Kauffmann, lacking such a sponsor, copied in the galleries disguised in boy’s clothing until her work attracted the attention of the duke of Modena, who gave her several portrait commissions and introduced her into Milanese society. Thus, Kauffmann realized the necessity of acquiring important patrons early in her career. Later, in the Florentine galleries, she obtained studio space by using letters of introduction from her Milanese patrons to circumvent opposition from male students who resented her presence there.

After Kauffmann’s mother died in 1757, she and her father traveled through northern Italy—where she studied the works of Correggio, the Carracci, and Guido Reni—arriving finally in Florence in 1762. It was there that she first encountered the newly emerging style of neoclassicism, primarily in the works of the young American painter Benjamin West. Going on to Rome the following year, she found herself at the center of the new style and became part of a sophisticated circle that included Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the principal theoretician of neoclassicism, as well as artists such as Gavin Hamilton, Raphael Mengs, Pompeo Batoni, and Nathaniel Dance.

This was a busy, productive period for Kauffmann, as she studied classical art and literature, architecture, and perspective. Acknowledgment of her success came in 1765, when she was elected to membership in the prestigious Roman Academy of St. Luke. Also during this period, the first of her neoclassical works appeared.

Life’s Work

In October of 1765, the Kauffmanns went to Venice, where Angelica studied the great colorists Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese, combining what she learned from them with the exalted language of the neoclassicists and the sensuality of Correggio. She was well on her way to formulating her own style of neoclassicism, which was witty, sophisticated, and elegant. In Venice, Kauffmann met Lady Wentworth, wife of the British ambassador, and was invited to return with her to London as her houseguest. Tempted by promises of commissions and fees exceeding what she could hope to get in Italy, Kauffmann accepted, but—as the invitation had been extended to her alone—she found herself separated from her father for the first time in her life.

Arriving in London in 1766, Kauffmann was reunited with her friends West and Dance. She also met Sir Joshua Reynolds, the principal exponent of painting in the grand manner, who was so impressed with her work that he asked to exchange portraits with her. The friendship and patronage of people such as Lady Wentworth and Sir Reynolds undoubtedly launched Kauffmann into a wealthy and aristocratic London society, but it was entirely through her own efforts that she succeeded there. Realizing that appearances were important in this society, she soon transformed herself into a fashionable lady and took a small apartment in a suitable neighborhood where she could receive her clients. Kauffmann was an attractive woman of great personal charm. Friends described her as talented, unpretentious, thoughtful, and modest, yet ambitious and industrious. A year after her arrival in London, she had saved enough money to send for her father and to acquire a comfortable house.

Kauffmann’s studio became one of the most popular salons of the day, frequented by serious patrons drawn there by her work, as well as many fashionable young men and women who came to socialize. Although Kauffmann had many suitors, including the artists Henri Fuseli and Nathaniel Dance, it was not until 1767 that she made a brief and unfortunate marriage of which she soon repented.

When the Royal Academy was formed in London in 1768, Kauffmann was among the forty original members. The only other woman in this group was the popular English still-life painter, Mary Moser. It was unusual for two women to be included as founders of the Royal Academy and still more remarkable that Kauffmann had attained a position of such prominence in English society after having been in the country for only two years.

Although it was her Romantic portrait style that first attracted the British, she had now introduced neoclassicism into the country and it was becoming the fashion. In the Royal Academy’s first annual exhibition, Kauffman showed four paintings with subjects drawn from classical antiquity, one of which, The Parting of Hector and Andromache, was praised as having been among the most original and popular works in the exhibition. It is interesting to note that only Kauffmann and West sent history pictures to this exhibition—even Reynolds exhibited portraits.

Kauffmann continued to paint classical subjects throughout her London years, but she and others, such as West and Fuseli, who wanted to raise history painting to the prominence it had in France, never fully succeeded in winning the British audience away from its first love, portraiture. Thus, Kauffmann’s subject pictures were always more highly regarded in Europe. Since Kauffmann earned most of her income in London with portraiture, she looked for ways to bring it closer to history painting. Primarily, she accomplished this goal by painting portraits as allegories; for example, the Marchioness Townshend and her son appeared as Venus and Cupid, Sir John Webb and Lady Webb and their children staged An Offering to Ceres, and Frances Hoare offered sacrifice to a statue of Minerva. Kauffmann also worked with some of the most fashionable architects in England, decorating the interiors of neoclassical homes. She also contributed four allegorical paintings for the lecture hall ceiling in the new quarters of the Royal Academy.

Kauffmann’s London period ended in 1781, when she married the painter Antonio Zucci and returned to Europe. In Venice, Kauffmann met Grand Duke Paul of Russia, the first of the large numbers of European nobility who gave her their patronage in the next years. Then, during a brief stay in Naples, she was offered the position of royal painter to King Ferdinand IV (also known as Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies), which she declined. In 1782, Kauffmann and Zucci settled permanently in Rome, where, during the next fifteen years, she produced some of her finest works. Many of these were sent to England, where she was still highly esteemed. In Rome, she was honored as the most famous and successful living painter, with her home and studio attracting many distinguished visitors. She worked at a slower pace after Zucci’s death in 1795, although she continued to be at the center of artistic and literary circles and was considered the head of the Roman school of painting. When she died in 1807, at age sixty-six, her funeral procession was lavish, in the manner of Renaissance masters such as Raphael, and included all the academicians of St. Luke, as well as representatives from academies throughout Europe.

Significance

Angelica Kauffmann’s neoclassical style was witty, sophisticated, and painterly. Her compositions were elegant. As a colorist, she was the equal of any painter of her day. She also had a greater influence upon her contemporaries than was understood by her early critics. Artists such as Gavin Hamilton emulated her, and many landscape painters of the later nineteenth century were influenced by her interpretations of the English light and countryside. Even Reynolds, from whom she herself learned much, gained a broader range of color and emotion from her example.

Kauffmann was a talented and serious artist who paid a high price for her success: the loss of her privacy and the impugning of her moral character. Such a price was paid, to some extent, by most successful women artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in Kauffmann’s case, the slander was particularly vicious, vindictive, and totally absurd. It all began with her arrival in London, coinciding with her first successes as a history painter. Some of the attempts to defame her resulted from simple envy and jealousy. Beyond that, in the art world of Kauffmann’s day, a woman might be tolerated only if she contented herself with a career as a still-life painter or minor portraitist. Any woman who aspired to go beyond those limits, as Kauffmann did, left herself open to personal as well as professional criticism. The private life of such a woman artist became public property, and, if she happened to be young and pretty, she would almost certainly be accused of using her feminine charms to further her career. Kauffmann was ambitious, but she also had the talent to succeed without resorting to tactics of that kind. It is very much to her credit that, having the courage of her own artistic convictions, she refused to allow anything to deter her from the goals she had set for herself and for her art.

Bibliography

Clement, Clara Erskine. Women in the Fine Arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. New York: Hacker, 1974. Originally published in 1904, this was an early attempt to assess the contributions made by women artists throughout history. Arranged alphabetically, the biographies are brief but fairly accurate in terms of basic facts. Affords the reader a handy and reliable way to compare and contrast the career of a particular artist with those of her peers.

Greer, Germaine. The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. A perceptive and often witty analysis of the struggles and achievements of women artists in general. Contains a lengthy discussion of Kauffmann’s personality and works, with a much-deserved indictment of those writers who, while largely ignoring her contributions, have perpetuated “the foolish prattle about her love life.”

Harris, Ann Sutherland, and Linda Nochlin. Women Artists, 1550-1950. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976. The catalog of one of the first exhibitions to concentrate solely on women artists. Contains an essay summarizing the complicated and varied highlights of Kauffmann’s career, emphasizing her major achievements and contributions. Also analyzes several of her most significant neoclassical compositions.

Manners, Victoria, and G. C. Williamson. Angelica Kauffmann, R. A.: Her Life and Her Works. New York: Hacker, 1976. A reprint of a biography first published in 1924, which was based on a manuscript discovered in London’s Royal Academy Library. Includes listings of Kauffmann’s works, arranged alphabetically by owners, by country, and by sale at auction. Contains a catalog of the engravings made after her works, with the names of the engravers.

Mayer, Dorothy. Angelica Kauffmann, R. A., 1741-1807. Gerrards Cross, England: Colin Smythe, 1972. This biography of Kauffmann updates the material found in Manners and Williamson. Also discusses the fluctuation of her reputation in the art world since her own time, pointing out that her work has regained some of its original prominence as a result of a revival of interest in the neoclassical era.

Mellor, Anne K. “British Romanticism, Gender, and Three Women Artists.” In The Consumption of Culture, 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text, edited by Ann Bermingham and John Brewer. New York: Routledge, 1995. Explores the relationship of eighteenth century British romantic writing to the work of Kauffmann and two other contemporary women artists, Mary Moser and Maria Hadfield Cosway.

Roworth, Wendy Wassyng, ed. Angelica Kauffmann: A Continental Artist in Georgian England. London: Reaktion Books, 1992. Collection of essays, published to accompany an exhibition of Kauffmann’s work at the Royal Pavillion, Art Gallery and Museums. Contributors examine Kauffmann’s life, her career, and why she has not received due credit by art historians. Concentrates on the work Kauffmann created during her fifteen years in England and the work she produced in Italy for British clients.