Angelica Kauffmann
Biography of Rococo Portrait Artist, Neoclassical History Painter.
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Self-Portrait: Torn Between Music
and Painting (1792)
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807)

Contents

• Biography
• Early Days
• Studies Renaissance Old Masters in Italy
• Portrait Painter in London
• Returns to Rome
• Reputation
• Funeral

COLOURS USED
For details of the pigments
used by Angelica Kauffmann,
see: 18th-Century Colour Palette.

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PAINTING
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Fine Art Painting.

Biography

One of the major Rococo artists of the Swiss School, the painter Angelica Kauffmann is also associated with the Neoclassical painting movement, chiefly through her history painting and mythological narratives, which she took up under the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). However, her real forte was Rococo art, notably portraiture, and also ladylike decorative pieces - some of which became a popular source of motifs for porcelain factories. In her decorative art, she also collaborated on numerous interior designs, in the style of neoclassical architecture, with Robert Adam (1728-92) and other architects. An extremely cultured lady, whose home in Rome was a meeting place for artists and scholars, Angelica Kauffmann's greatest portrait paintings include: Portrait of the Family of Ferdinand IV (1784, Capodimonte Museum, Naples), Portrait of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1787, Goethe National Museum, Weimar), Self-Portrait Torn Between Music and Painting (1792, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), Portrait of Ludwig I of Bavaria as Crown Prince (1807, Neue Pinakothek, Munich). Along with the French portrait painter Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) and the Italian artist Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757), Angelica Kauffmann was one of the three most important women painters of the eighteenth century. An important male contemporary was the French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805).

Early Days

Born in Chur, Switzerland, Kauffmann spent most of her life in London and Rome. As a young girl she mastered Italian, English and French in addition to German, her native language, and was also considered an artistic child prodigy. She received her early training in drawing and oil painting from her father, the portraitist and fresco painter, Johann Joseph Kauffmann (1707-82). In addition, she was a highly talented singer, and was (as a later self-portrait shows) torn between pursuing a musical or painting career.

Studies Renaissance Old Masters in Italy

In 1760, accompanied by her father, Kauffmann visited Italy in order to study the paintings of the Old Masters, and to learn about Renaissance art and architecture. In 1762 she settled in Rome, where she found a worthy mentor in the German academic and archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). He was one of the leading figures in the neoclassical art movement, a reaction to the exaggerations of Baroque painting and the over-ornamentation of Rococo; it is characterized by a return to the clear, simple beauty of the Italian Renaissance. Winckelmann encouraged Kauffmann to paint historical and classical mythological scenes, regarded by the academies as the highest form of art - at least, according to the official "Hierarchy of the Genres". Kauffmann also met a number of other leading cultural figures, including the Italian artists Pompeo Batoni (1708-87), Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78), the Austrian painter Anton von Maron (1731-1808) and the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton (1723-98). While in Rome, she found a ready supply of customers for her Rococo/Neoclassical portraits among distinguished tourists (mostly from England) visiting Rome as part of the 'Grand Tour' of Europe.

Portrait Painter in London

In 1766, Kauffman moved to London, where she stayed for 15 years. An unprecedentedly successful career followed, with numerous commissions and official honours accruing to her. In 1768 she was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, founded by Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), a fervent admirer of her work. (Kauffmann and Mary Moser were the only women of the 36 founding members of the Royal Academy.) She was already a member of the Academies in Florence, Rome and Bologna. In London, her main activity was portrait art, including self-portraits which she executed to engage the attention of prospective patrons. In addition, she had a keen interest in history painting - choosing to paint famous heroines of classical history (including Lucretia, Iphigenia, Penelope and Virginia) who symbolized certain feminine virtues. (It's interesting to note that Kauffmann was painting her scenes of classical mythology at the same time as the fresco paintings of Pompeii were being excavated.)

Returns to Rome

In 1781, Kauffmann married her second husband, the Venetian veduta painter Antonio Zucchi (1726-95) - a contemporary of Canaletto (1697-1768), Francesco Guardi (1712–1793) and Bernardo Bellotto (1720–1780), and in 1782 the couple moved into the Case de'Stefanoni in the Via Gregoriana in Rome, where Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) had lived and worked as successor to Pierre Subleyras. This elegantly appointed house soon became one of the centres of the city's active social life. Artists and friends, most of them foreigners, met here, surrounded by the artist's collection of oil paintings, sculptures, plaster casts and books. She was a wonderful tour guide and made it her personal responsibility to show prominent political, scientific and cultural figures around "the Rome of the ancients". With them she would visit architectural sites from classical antiquity as well as the city's splendid collections of pictures and sculptures. The Sunday art excursions with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) during his sojourn in Rome from 1786 to 1788 have entered the annals of art history.

Reputation

Praise was heaped on Kauffmann even during her lifetime. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) called her "the most cultivated woman in Europe". The German writer Goethe, who was close to the artist, described her in his Travels in Italy, started in 1787, as a woman "very sensitive to everything beautiful, true and tender, as well as unbelievably modest", and praised her as a "woman of truly enormous talent". In Roman Carnival (1789) he gave her the honorable title of "the foremost woman painter of the century".

Funeral

On November 7, 1807, people in Rome witnessed a unique spectacle; a funeral designed by the sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822). A huge crowd of common citizens, 50 priests, 50 Capuchin monks, prelates in heavy ceremonial robes, and others accompanied the painter Angelica Kauffman on her final journey. Girls wearing classical-style costumes walked alongside the catafalque, looking as if they had just sprung from one of the deceased artist's pictures. Directly behind them marched the president of the Academy of Art in Rome and others from the art world. Two of Kauffmann's paintings were carried in the funeral procession, as was Canova's sculpture of the artist's right hand, on a velvet cushion with her working utensils surrounded by a bay wreath.

Paintings by Angelica Kauffmann can be seen in many of the best art museums throughout the world.

• For more famous female painters, see: Homepage.
• For analysis of important pictures by male and female artists, see: Famous Paintings Analyzed.