Angelica Kauffman

Maria Anna Angelika Kauffmann (30 October 1741 – 5 November 1807), better known as Angelica Kauffman, was a Swiss painter who built a thriving career in both London and Rome. Though she is chiefly remembered as a history painter, she also excelled at portraits, landscapes, and decorative work. In 1768, she became one of only two women—alongside Mary Moser—among the founding members of London’s Royal Academy of Art. Kauffman was born in Chur, Switzerland, and her family moved several times during her childhood: to Morbegno in 1742, then to Como in 1752, and later to Schwarzenberg in Austria in 1757, where her father was working for a local bishop. Her father, Joseph Johann Kauffmann, was a skilled Austrian muralist who often traveled for work, and he trained Angelica as his assistant. She was a child prodigy, learning four languages—German, Italian, French, and English—from her mother, Cleophea Lutz. She also had a strong singing voice and musical talent, but chose painting over opera after a Catholic priest warned her that the opera world was full of “seedy people.” By age twelve, she was already painting portraits for bishops and nobles. After her mother died in 1757, she and her father moved to Milan, followed by long stays in Italy. In Florence in 1762, she first encountered Neoclassical painting. That same year, she was elected to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno and made an honorary member of the Accademia Clementina di Bologna. By January 1763, she was in Rome, where she connected with the British community, improved her English, and continued portrait work. She later moved to Naples, studied Old Masters, and sent her first painting to a public exhibition in London. She returned to Rome in 1764, then traveled to Bologna and Venice, celebrated everywhere for her talent and charm. In 1764, the scholar Winckelmann wrote that she was painting his portrait, spoke Italian and German fluently, and expressed herself easily in French and English, which made her popular among British visitors. He also called her beautiful and praised her singing. In May 1765, she was elected to the Accademia di San Luca, submitting *Allegory of Hope* as her reception piece. That same month, her work appeared in an exhibition of the Free Society of Artists in England, and she soon moved there. In Venice, Lady Wentworth, wife of the British ambassador, persuaded Kauffman to accompany her to London. She lodged with a surgeon’s family, including Anne Home. Her first work shown in London was a portrait of David Garrick, which had been exhibited the year before she arrived in June 1766. Lady Wentworth’s rank opened doors for her, and the royal family showed her great favor. Her closest friend was Sir Joshua Reynolds, who often noted her in his pocketbook as “Miss Angelica” or “Miss Angel.” He painted her in 1766, and she returned the compliment with her *Portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds*. She also created a variation of Guercino’s *Et in Arcadia ego*, a subject Reynolds later repeated. In 1767, she was tricked into marrying an impostor calling himself Count Frederick de Horn; they separated the next year. Likely thanks to Reynolds, she was among those who signed the petition to establish the Royal Academy. In its first catalogue in 1769, she appeared with “R.A.” after her name, sharing that honor only with Mary Moser, and contributed *Interview of Hector and Andromache* along with three other classical works. In 1771, she spent several months in Ireland as a guest of the Lord Lieutenant, Viscount Townshend, painting portraits there, including those of Philip Tisdall and his wife Mary, and of Henry Loftus, 1st Earl of Ely, and his family. She may have had an affair with Jean-Paul Marat, then a doctor living in London. In 1775, fellow Academician Nathaniel Hone caused controversy with his satirical painting *The Conjurer*, which attacked the fashion for Italian Renaissance art and mocked Reynolds. The Royal Academy rejected it, and it originally included a nude caricature of Kauffman in the top left corner, which Hone painted over after she complained. The image of a little girl with an old man was seen as a symbol of Kauffman and Reynolds’s closeness, age difference, and rumored affair. From 1769 to 1782, Kauffman exhibited annually with the Royal Academy, sometimes sending as many as seven pictures, usually on classical or allegorical themes.