Erminia

Angelica Kauffman (sometimes Angelika Kauffmann) (1741-1807) was one of the most important and famous women artists in European history. Kauffman’s story makes her a truly modern artist for several reasons, as well as an impressive role model for women and artists ever since.

Born in Switzerland in 1841, Angelica was a child prodigy, demonstrating great talents in music and art by the age of 12. Her early paintings were influenced by the French Rococo works of Henri Gravelot and François Boucher. In 1754 and 1763 she visited Italy, and while in Rome she was influenced by the Neoclassicism of Anton Raphael Mengs. In 1766 Kauffman was encouraged to visit London by Lady Wentworth, wife of the English ambassador in Italy. There, she established herself as a leading figure in the art world of late 18th-century England, becoming closely involved with art and taste in the neoclassical period. She became a close friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds and was a founder member of the Royal Academy, exhibiting in their annual exhibitions for most of her career. During the 1770s Kauffmann was one of a team of artists who supplied the painted decorations for Adam-designed neoclassical interiors. Kauffmann retired to Rome in the early 1780s with her second husband, the Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi.

Kauffman was wonderfully creative in her output, ranging from portraits and history paintings, to etchings, engravings and designs for decorative paintings. Her subject matter ranged across classical and medieval history and mythology, through the Renaissance to the contemporary literature of England, France, Germany, and Italy, reflecting the broad spectrum of popular and intellectual taste in the late 18th century.
Above all, Kauffman was an entrepreneur. She had an ability to know exactly what the public wanted and, as her prints testify, she was not afraid to multiply and disseminate her art into society. To that end, Kauffman was directly involved in the production and marketing of her prints, becoming a significant figure at a time when creative (as opposed to reproductive) printmaking was thin on the ground. She was also open to new technologies like stipple engraving and Matthew Boulton’s reproductive ‘mechanical paintings’ (where an aquatint on coated paper was transferred to canvas and touched up by hand). The stipple engraving uses etched or engraved dots to build up areas of tone, a technique that developed out of the French ‘crayon manner’ that used roulettes to reproduce chalk drawings.
Kauffman’s stipple engravings filled a market demand for ‘furniture prints’ – decorative prints, often oval in composition – intended to be framed and hung on the wall rather than collected in portfolios. Between 1774 and 1781, when Kauffman left England, some 75 stipple engravings were made after her paintings and drawings. 

This coloured stipple engraving pictures Erminia, a character in Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem delivered (1581) based on the conquest of Jerusalem by Christian crusaders. The poem became a much-favoured source for artists, typically focussing on the cross-cultural, often fraught, love stories. Erminia is one of the most depicted figures from this poem, the central theme of which – conflict between Christians and Muslims – resonates in our contemporary moment. Erminia, a captured Moorish princess, falls in love with Tancredi the Christian crusader who ‘liberates’ her. When she finds out he is wounded she tries to visit him by disguising herself as Clorina, a Saracen Amazon Tancredi loves. While nearing his camp, she is surprised by guards. Fleeing, she hides on the banks of the River Jordan, seeking shelter with an old shepherd and his family. The moment pictured in this engraving, after an original painting by Kauffman, shows the love-sick Erminia writing Tancred’s name on a tree. The text below the image reads:

Of when beneath some shady groves retreat
The flocks are sheltered from meridian heat
On the finest beeches rind the pensive dame
Carves in a thousand forms her Tancred’s name

Later, Erminia finds Tancredi wounded and heals him with her hair. She abandons her faith and converts to Christianity.

Rebecca Rice, Curator Historical New Zealand Art, March 2024