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Overview
Angelica Kauffmann (often Kauffman) spent only 15 years in England, but made a significant impact on the 18th-century London art scene, becoming one of only two female Founder Members of the Royal Academy and an all-time role model for women artists.
Born in Chur, Switzerland in 1741, Kauffmann was quickly recognised as a child prodigy. Her father, a painter himself, gave her drawing lessons from a young age as the family moved between Austria, Switzerland and Italy. In Italy she established a reputation as an artist and was elected a member of the Roman Accademia di San Luca at the age of 23. After moving to London in 1766, Kauffmann struck up a close friendship with Joshua Reynolds, commemorated in the portraits they painted of each other. When the Royal Academy of Arts was established in 1768 with Joshua Reynolds as President, she and Mary Moser were the only two women invited to become Founder Members.
Kauffmann painted portraits and landscapes, but identified herself primarily as a history painter, the genre Reynolds placed at the heart of the Academy’s teaching. During this period, women were still prohibited from drawing nude models and could only draw the male figure from existing casts, as Kauffmann depicts in Design. Long patronised in art history for being merely 'decorative', revisionist art history today regards Kauffmann's style as being an equally valid counterpart to the long dominant, austere and 'macho' Neo-classicism of her near contemporary Jacques Louis David. In architectural and furniture decoration, ceramics and hand-coloured stipple engraving, the Kauffmann aesthetic had a far greater reach in terms of the lifestyles of polite society than David's.
In 1778, Kauffmann was commissioned by the Royal Academy to paint a set of four ‘Elements of Art’, to be displayed in a new Council Chamber. A visual representation of the theories that Reynolds set out in his Discourses on Art, the four huge ceiling paintings present four female figures as Invention, Composition, Design and Colour. In her later years, Kauffmann retired to Rome, where she died in 1807. While her productivity somewhat declined, her reputation remained very high and her funeral was organised by the most famous artist in Rome, sculptor Antonio Canova. Soon after, a bust of Kauffman sculpted by her cousin Johann Peter Kauffmann was placed in the Pantheon in Rome, beside Raphael’s.
Between 1762 and 1779 Kauffmann created a total of 41 etchings, which together with engravings form the basis of Te Papa's collection. When she left London, she sold the plates to the publisher John Boydell, who had them reworked and reissued. In 1804 weaker prints were offered from the worn plates by the publisher John P. Thompson.
Young woman reading (1770) is another rare print. This impression pre-dates the far more common version produced in 1781, when Kauffman sold the plate to John Boydell, best known for his Shakespeare Gallery. She did so just before leaving London to live permanently in Rome. It is one of four etchings of young women reading produced in 1770; the subject-matter is a favourite one for Kauffman. It reveals how Neoclassicism could on the one hand aim at a linear idealism, on the other, how it could happily address private, domestic themes completely unconnected with classical gods and heroes. In its mood, it is a definite precursor of the bourgeois simplicity and elegance of the Biedermeier style of 40-50 years later.
See:
AKRP (Angelika Kauffmann Research Project), 'Etchings', https://www.angelika-kauffmann.de/en/etchings/
Royal Academy,'Angelica Kauffman RA (1741-1807)', https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/angelica-kauffman-ra
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art August 2018