Angelica Kauffman: Art History's Heroine
By Alexandra Harris
Published on 4 April 2024
In this long read from RA Magazine, Alexandra Harris argues that Angelica Kauffman's depictions of women blazed a trail for the female gaze.
From the Spring 2024 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.
Her name was heard in the coffee houses and parlours of London before she arrived. Angelica Kauffman: a young painter in Italy who was coming to England. Prodigiously talented, it was said. She was Swiss, apparently, though some said Austrian. She spoke at least four languages. She had studied in the galleries of Milan, and Bologna, and Rome. Her Portrait of David Garrick, painted in Naples, had already been displayed at the Free Society of Artists in London. There the actor was: turning in his chair, alert, with an air of amusement but taking it seriously, gripped by the experience of being painted. A woman artist staring in the face of a man: it wasn’t proper. Yet really it didn’t look indecent, this picture. Its intensity was of another kind. It was as if one brilliant, questing, assured artist were looking right in the eye of another.
Now everyone would want to sit for her. She’d be bound to fall in love of course: how diverting the gossip would be. Thomas Gainsborough was in Bath, fusing grandeur and naturalism as he painted countesses with the breeze in their hair. Boswell and Dr Johnson were talking at the Mitre on Fleet Street. Readers were comparing notes on new instalments of that antic, indefinable novel Tristram Shandy, so rich in tender feeling for all its oddness. Joshua Reynolds was urging his contemporaries to think more ambitiously about British art. It was 1766, and Angelica Kauffman was coming to town.
In London over the next 15 years, she established and sustained a reputation as one of the outstanding contemporary painters in Europe. Her fame was not of the kind that flares briefly and dwindles. She returned to Rome in 1782 and worked there, with astonishing energy and dedication, until she could no longer hold her brush. She was internationally celebrated and constantly in demand for four decades, the whole of her adult life. Her images were to be found in palaces and also – a new phenomenon – in many thousands of ordinary homes where engravings were getting sooty over the fireplace, or reproduced on teacups, tiles and fans. The emotionally expressive figures of Penelope, from Homer, and ‘Poor Maria’, from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, came to define a shared visual language of sympathy. Kauffman shaped aesthetic fashions; then she used the power of fashion to direct attention back to the imaginative life of art, and to the rightful place of women at its centre.
In London in the 1760s, Reynolds and Kauffman were immediately allied in their advocacy of history painting – the depiction of stirring or exemplary scenes from classical mythology or the Bible, or from the annals of the European past. For Reynolds, who urged Royal Academy students to choose for their subject "some eminent instance of heroic action, or heroic suffering", history was the genre in which artists might realise their greatest potential, striving towards "intellectual grandeur". The trouble was that the British public was more inclined to commission portraits of themselves, or pictures of their horses. Reynolds celebrated history painting in his teaching, while holding back from doing much of it himself. It was Kauffman who brought her history painting canvases to be exhibited year after year.
Portrait of David Garrick, 1764
Self-portrait with Bust of Minerva, c. 1780–84
Portrait of Joshua Reynolds, 1767
Kauffman ignored in her subjects anything of the kind Reynolds regarded as "accidental deformity": no spots or wrinkles, no half-hidden pride or anger, absolutely none of the fetishes and nightmares that her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli RA was secreting onto paper with dark glee. It was smooth flattery, yes; it was also a blazing display of faith in shared ideals and the possibility of human goodness. "Gentlemen", began Reynolds, each time he stood to lecture, but the most assured and numerous models of the Grand Manner to be studied at Academy exhibitions continued to be those of ‘Signora Angelica’.
Kauffman made her own homes into another kind of academy. In Golden Square, in Soho, and at Via Sistina 72, which became one of the most celebrated cultural addresses in Rome, people gathered to talk about the arts and watch the painter. Sitters would be asked to read aloud, especially the poetry of German contemporaries: Herder, Klopstock, and pre eminently Goethe. It sounds a daunting test of spontaneous literary insight, but her guests were enraptured – lit up by the charm, grace and modesty of their host.
She focused on Penelope rather than Ulysses… she had her eye, intently, on the experience of the woman who waits, mourns and weaves her own tale
She had studied from girlhood the heroic paintings of Europe, but her approach to history was not like anyone else’s. Eschewing the standard repertoire of Homeric subjects, she focused on Penelope rather than Ulysses; 240 years before Margaret Atwood launched a thousand revisionary narratives with her novella The Penelopiad, Kauffman had her eye, intently, on the experience of the woman who waits, mourns and weaves her own tale (Penelope at her Loom, below). Venturing into English medieval history, she alit on the apocryphal story of Queen Eleanor (Eleanor Sucking the Venom out of the Wound of her Husband King Edward I). Kauffman’s Eleanor bends over the king in what looks like a tender kiss and is actually a radical act, one in which she risks poisoning herself. With its action pushed to the foreground, and its pools of rich colour rhythmically distributed, the composition recalls Poussin’s Death of Germanicus (1627); conversations with the Old Masters seem to vibrate through Kauffman’s forms. But here it’s a life-saving woman who commands our gaze.
Of the 36 founding members of Britain’s new Royal Academy of Arts, it was Kauffman and Reynolds who did most to foster the "Grand Style". "Ideal perfection and beauty are not to be sought in the heavens but upon the earth," Reynolds urged in the ‘Discourses’ he delivered to Royal Academy students; no single natural object is perfect in itself, but by tireless study of imperfect natural examples the ‘genuine artist’ seeks out an abstract idea of his subject – an oak tree, a rose, a courageous leader – "more perfect than any one original". This notion of art, so different from post-Romantic allegiance to idiosyncrasy and subjective vision, can seem startlingly alien today. It’s an exhilarating reminder of how far the central aims of art can change, and why we might need to keep open minds.
Goethe, during his time in Italy, intent on studying the visual arts, made himself Kauffman’s pupil. Each Sunday for a year in 1787-88 they visited galleries, churches and palaces together and discussed for many hours what they saw. Goethe kept adding "als weib" ("as a woman") when he told friends of her tremendous talents; he never quite stopped being amazed. But he knew how much he was gaining: "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She also has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender". He trusted her interpretations of his plays and carefully wrote them down; he valued her readings of pictures more than anyone’s. The sentimental friendship that deepened between them was founded on clear-eyed mutual respect. In the studio on Via Sistina, long after Goethe’s return to Weimar, Kauffman read his tragedy Torquato Tasso again and again, letting its emotion guide her brush. And to the end of his life Goethe remained grateful for revelatory Italian hours in the company of his dear and priceless (unschätzbaren) friend.
Kauffman had represented an ideal friendship between painting and poetry in a picture of 1782, Self-Portrait in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry. It is one of the fascinating series of self-portraits in which, at intervals all through her career, she expressed her vision of herself as an artist. She shows herself, drawingboard in one hand, porte-crayon in the other, equipped to draw but not at this moment drawing. Before putting crayon to paper, this artist is listening to Poetry, who sits close beside her. In a moment of inspiration, she sits forward in eager anticipation and receptivity. An idea is forming. The whole canvas communicates the time-stopping wonder of it. Kauffman, who painted scenes of heroic endurance or grief from classical epics and European history, wanted also to paint this, a subject as exciting as any she knew: an artist having a thought as she listens to poetry.
It was breathtakingly bold of Kauffman to present a version of herself as a representative figure of Design (or in Italian Disegno, the term encompassing the intellectual and imaginative power to design an image and the skill to draw it). The self-assertion is characteristically balanced by the whole tenor of the portrait, in which the artist is not declaring but listening. She is a student, learning. She is not finished and certain, but transforming before us with open mind and keen attention. All this is the very essence of Design, Kauffman suggests, and an essential part of herself.
When Virginia Woolf looked back at the history of women writers, she drew attention to the "very important turn in the road" at which Aphra Behn, a middle-class widow, with no aristocratic wealth behind her, showed that it was possible to make an independent living as a writer. This was a different matter to great ladies writing for private audiences at their leisure. This was business. It had to be kept up year after year; it took courage, wit and practicality; it contravened the confected social codes that made it distasteful for a respectable woman to work professionally. "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn," Woolf argues, "for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." The flowers upon a tomb conjure an image appropriate to the age of sensibility, to delicate taste and the worship of art, but with cunning fluency Woolf lets fall among the rose petals that incongruous and crucial word "earned".
Given her devotion to ideals of chastity and modesty, Kauffman might have been alarmed by any comparison with the adventurous Aphra Behn a century before. But she was a working woman who dared to be an artist in the public eye. She knew that in order to think and paint freely she needed money and a room of her own – or a substantial suite of rooms, with space to entertain and exhibit. Money from her work gave her the independence to do what she most wanted to do, which was to paint, look, read, and paint again. Never did she take her income for granted.
She lived in some style, though mostly she regarded the carriages and fine hospitality as necessary investments to please the patrons. In her pictures, there were no ormolu tables or velvet drapes like those, for example, in the contemporary portraits of Pompeo Batoni. A plain column could give what she wanted, a setting abstracted from worldly wealth – albeit recognisable as a column by the most expensive painter around. Money earned her the right to choose her setting, and to paint her mind. When she had enough to spare, she bought pictures. She turned wealth back into art as paintings by Titian, Da Volterra, Paris Bordone and at least three Canalettos came through her doors. Goethe observed how she embarked on intense study of the great paintings she now lived with on intimate terms. Then she set to work again, experimenting with what she had learned.
We do not have Kauffman’s notes or correspondence to set alongside Reynolds’s ‘Discourses’, though many revered her aesthetic judgements. In 1805, when she knew she was near the end, she burnt her letters and other papers. She did it, she said, to save "quiet passages of friendly communication" from being made public by her biographers. It is testament to the preference for discretion and quietness that was always there in her work, living alongside the brio and boldness that leap first from the canvases. Taking control of her legacy, she erased her words and left the pictures. For all their monumentality, there are quiet passages of friendly communication here too, and perhaps their grandeur is in that remarkable combination.
Alexandra Harris is Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. Her new book is The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape (Faber).
Angelica Kauffman takes place in the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries, Burlington House from 1 March – 30 June 2024.
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