A Grand Manner Radical: Angela Kauffman at The Royal Academy
The Royal Academy spotlights perhaps its most overlooked founder...
March 21, 2024
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
Recent years have seen a concerted effort by the art world to focus on art history’s women artists who have lacked sufficient institutional representation. Just last year, to name only a few exhibitions, we saw ‘Women Masters: Old and Modern’ at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ‘Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th Century’, Hamburg, and ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Not to mention, the upcoming ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520 - 1920 at Tate Britain'. One artist for which public attention has been well overdue since her Georgian heyday is Angelica Kauffman.
Despite waiting 250 years for her first solo show at the institution she helped found, in the 1700s Kauffman was one of the most eminent artists in Europe. One contemporary commented that ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’. She expertly tightrope-walked between painting an image as both a virtuous woman and a professional artist. She had a royal repertoire of patrons receiving commissions from Catherine The Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette’s brother Joseph II, Maria Carolina Queen of Naples and Sicily, and England’s Queen Charlotte, for whom she painted a delightful allegorical portrait — with baby George IV donning fairy wings representing ‘The Genius of The Arts’ (foreshadowing his exuberant reign influencing the tastes and fashions of the Georgian era).
Her closeness to Queen Charlotte and England’s leading artist Joshua Reynolds led to the founding of the Royal Academy to promote English art. She was among the two female founding members, the other being the painter Mary Moser, yet throughout her career faced sexual discrimination and ridicule. On display, Johan Joseph Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy 1771-72 includes the foremost male academicians in a life drawing room but Moser’s and Kauffman's presence has been relegated to portraits as they were forbidden entry to the room on moral grounds.
The exhibition is the result of three decades of research by the Angelica Kauffman Research Project. Despite its small size, it finally gives Kauffman the stage she deserves. The exhibition chronologically follows Kauffman’s career from Switzerland to Italy, London and finally back to Rome.
Her portraits galvanised her reputation as a serious artist; that of David Garrick (1764) sparked coffee house gossip, preceding her arrival in London. Garrick was England’s most famous actor and had sat for Kauffman in Naples. The portrait in which Garrick turns back to the viewer clutching the back of his chair, which acts as a barrier between artist and sitter, aroused speculation as to the nature of the artist and actor's relationship.
Her portrait of the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was received without speculation of indecency and celebrated for its likeness. Winckelmann had a marked influence on the rise of Neoclassicism in the late 18th century, a movement which looked to Hellenistic art for clear, crisp lines and balanced form, inspired by the ‘purity’ of drawing on Hellenistic vases, informing the style of Kauffman and her contemporary Reynolds, which Reynolds termed ‘The Grand Style’.
From today’s perspective, Neoclassicism could easily be mistaken for Realism but it's so far removed from ‘the real’. It does not seek to represent visual reality but ideals. When Kauffmann paints herself, she paints who she is, her identity as an artist, inhabiting a body but not defined by it.
As a form of Neoclassicism the ‘Grand Style’ borrowed from Plato’s theory of perfect forms. Reynolds, teaching at the Royal Academy at the time, taught his students that a real artist should seek out perfect forms and only use imperfect ‘real’ objects as references for the depiction of an ideal. Kauffman, much like the airbrushing world of glossy magazines today, would ignore any, what Reynolds termed; ‘accidental deformities’ spots, wrinkles, or hidden pride or anger in her sitters. The polar opposite to the lurid fetishism of her Swiss-born contemporary Henry Fuseli, future Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy.
Kauffman’s work is highly intellectual and so far removed from the visceral painting of the 21st century. Today, we are accustomed to instant gratification and sensationalism, so the lay viewer may face a barrier in the symbolism and allegory in her work. Viewers unfamiliar with the classics or Biblical stories will struggle to interpret the scenes of what Reynolds described as ‘Intellectual Grandeur’ in his ‘Grand Manner’ style.
This rejection of Rococo and movement toward an aesthetic that Romanticism would later react against can appear dry to a modern viewer. At first glance, Kauffman’s paintings may seem tepid, but further scrutiny - and a nudge from the curators - highlights the revolutionary nature of Kauffman’s work and her importance in dynamiting the female gaze into the Western canon. She practices historical painting but almost exclusively from the perspective of women.
When she was just twenty-three, Kauffman painted Penelope waiting at her loom for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Penelope was not a character who was frequently depicted in historical paintings at the time, but Kauffman based many compositions around her story and other artists followed. She focused increasingly on female protagonists such as Cleopatra mourning Mark Antony or Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
She was constantly boldly affirming her artistic capability and prowess in her work; around 1780, she painted a self-portrait in which she appears face to face with the Goddess Minerva (Goddess of wisdom, war, art and justice) and in Zeuxis Selecting Models for His Painting of Helen of Troy, she aligns herself with Neoclassicism, placing herself at the centre of painting arguing the superiority of art over nature. The painting depicts Zeuxis inspecting five female models (to take their best features as reference for painting the most beautiful woman in the world Helen of Troy), but Kauffman has depicted the fifth model on the far right as herself, taking Zeuxis’s brush and ready to paint herself.
In allegorical painting, Desegno (or Design / Drawing) was usually portrayed as male but, for her commission for four ceiling pantings for the Royal Academy’s council room, Kauffman depicts Design as a woman and in Self-portrait in the character of design listening to the inspiration of poetry (1782), she confidently places herself as the personification of what was, at the time, regarded as the purest and highest form of creativity.
Kauffman was an erudite and she knew it. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described her as “the most cultivated woman in Europe”. Her studios in Soho’s Golden Square, and later at Vita Sistina 7, beside the Spanish Steps in Rome, became cultural hubs where people gathered to talk about art and watch her paint. Sitters were asked to read aloud and recite German poetry. In fact, Goethe sought out Kauffman to study under, and each Sunday between 1787-88 they visited churches, palaces and galleries and discussed what they saw. He said of Kauffman that "Her eye is so highly trained and her technical knowledge of art so great. She has enormous feeling for everything that is beautiful, true and tender", though he was always careful to add ‘als weib’ (as a woman).
Angelica Kauffman is showing at The Royal Academy until 30th June.
