Angelica Kauffman

This book by the co-curators of an exhibition of the same name at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, spotlights the career of one of the two founding women members of the Royal Academy. Angelica Kauffman’s membership was an important accomplishment, as women artists would not be elected as members to the Academy for another 200 years. Although born in Switzerland, Kauffman (1741–1807) was a multinational, cosmopolitan artist who also lived in Italy and painted portraits of European royalty. It was during her more than 10 years spent in London (1766–81) that she became recognized not just as a skillful portrait painter but as a history painter, which was unusual for a woman artist. While employing a wide range of subject matter, her history paintings depicted active rather than passive heroines, and in some of her works, the lines between allegorical interpretations of subjects and self-portraiture were blurred. A well-trained and well-read artist, Kauffman studied the Italian Renaissance and Baroque masters and was informed by the color theories and aesthetics of Goethe’s circle, as this catalogue demonstrates.