The beautiful – and sublime – art of Angelica Kauffman
TWO SWISS PAINTERS, both born in 1741, loomed large over the British art scene at the end of the eighteenth century. They may have been compatriots, albeit separated by the Grison Alps, but they came from different artistic planets. From Zurich out leapt the handsome, swashbuckling antihero Heinrich Füssli, for whom the ! was surely invented. Füssli first visited London in 1764 before settling permanently in 1779, becoming Henry Fuseli RA, and eventually Professor and Keeper. He was a preposterous pocket Michelangelo, purveyor of a fantastic priapic sublime, his chiaroscuro horrors always seen through tumescent eyeballs – “Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent”; “The Nightmare”; “Titania and Bottom”; “Fertilisation of Egypt”, “Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers”, etc, etc. Pursued unsuccessfully by Mary Wollstonecraft, whose portrait he painted, Fuseli opined: “I hate clever women. They are only troublesome”.
From Chur in eastern Switzerland, via Italy, the clever, charismatic and beautiful Angelica Kauffman sailed serenely into London in 1766. A child prodigy who had chosen painting over music, she was well read in several languages and had extensive knowledge of art. (At her death she owned sixty-six bound volumes of prints, centred on antiquity, the Renaissance and the seventeenth century.) She brought as as chaperone her painter father, who had taught her, his presence making her look semi-respectable. Kauffman was already a well-known phenomenon, having painted portraits and histories for many British grand tourists in Rome. She was the first female artist anywhere to enjoy an international reputation; the first to make plenty of money; the first to paint histories as well as portraits; the first to have her pictures routinely turned into prints; the first to have her pictures and prints used for architectural and design decoration; and the first to have her love life the subject of continual rumour, gossip and vicious satire. On the urging of Queen Charlotte and Joshua Reynolds, who was said to be her lover, Kauffman was a founding member of the RA in 1768, one of only two women among thirty-four men. (The next woman was not admitted until 1936.)
Whereas Fuseli was a standard-bearer of the sublime, Kauffman expressed and embodied the beautiful – to use those fateful polarities defined by Edmund Burke in 1757. Goethe, who knew Kauffman later in Italy, would call her “highly sensitive to everything beautiful, true and tender”. Reynolds dubbed her Miss Angel. A self-styled possessor of a “beautiful soul” and “painter of the Graces”, often erudite and original, she chose mostly female or female-centred subjects. She was com
