An exhibition at the Royal Academy finally does justice to the female superstar who was one of its founding members, says
Roderick Conway Morris ANGELICA KAUFFMAN
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The 18th-century German philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried Herder declared the artist Angelica Kauffman (1742-1807) to be ‘perhaps the most cultivated woman in Europe’. A no less fervent champion, Goethe, wrote that she was an artist ‘whom no other living painter can approach in taste and lightness of touch’. After she came to London, Joshua Reynolds admiringly dubbed her ‘Miss Angel’, and the Danish ambassador Graf Schönborn observed: ‘The whole world is Angelica mad.’
At the height of her fame Kauffman was the most celebrated artist in Europe. In 1762 she was elected to the academies of Bologna and Florence, and three years later she was inducted into Rome’s Accademia di San Luca.
In 1768, along with Mary Moser, she was one of just two women among the 36 founding members of the Royal Academy in London. They were represented in Johann Zoffany’s amusing 1771-2 painting of the assembled worthies preparing for a life-drawing class by two portraits on the wall (with Kauffman’s on the left), since their actual presence would have been indecorous given there were two nude male models in the studio.
Shamefully, there were no further female RAs until 1922. And despite the fact that Kauffman exhibited at all the academy’s annual exhibitions for most of the rest of her life, the institution has never before given her a solo show. Now the RA is redressing the balance with an attractive and enlightening exhibition curated by Bettina Baumgärtel.
Like some modern pop stars, Kauffman became so famous that she was known simply by her Christian name. This chimed nicely with the titles of sentimental novels of the era, such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Fanny Burney’s Evelina.
Like these fictional heroines Kauffman was notionally raised in innocent rustic seclusion. Her father, Joseph, was a journeyman painter from the village of Schwarzenberg in the Bregenz Forest in Austria. He had met her mother while decorating a church in Chur, across the border in Switzerland. After Angelica was born there in 1741, the precocious artist did not visit Schwarzenberg until she was in her sixteenth year, and only twice more after that.
