Blind man's bluff

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.

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.

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.

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.