Angelica Kauffmann
(1741 - 1807) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Angelica Kauffmann |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Chur,Graubünden, Switzerland |
| Nationality: |
Austrian |
| Birth: |
1741 |
| Death: |
1807 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Medium: |
Oil, etching |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
Neo-Classical |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
Printmaking
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Biography
Angelica Kauffmann was immensely gifted and was encouraged at an early age to develop her artistic talent. She executed a self-portrait in oils when she was twelve and, at the age of sixteen, used engravings as a basis for large format paintings of the Apostles that she created for a church in her native Switzerland. Her father, a minor painter, soon realized that he had nothing more to teach his daughter. He travelled with her to Italy in order to acquaint her with the best models and foster her career. There, she copied paintings in the great collections and made contact with patrons of the arts and fellow painters from around Europe.
Kauffmann painted this portrait of the scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann in 1764 in Rome. Winckelmann, who administered the Vatican collection of antiquities, had acquired a reputation far beyond the boundaries of Italy for his writings on the art of Classical Antiquity. The commission to paint his portrait was a godsend for the twenty-two-year-old artist, who benefited from the fame of her sitter and his widespread connections. A contemporary wrote of the portrait: 'Angelica's Winckelmann is a masterpiece in its color, pose, harmony, drawing and power' The subtle color composition and the gentle features are typical of Kauffmann's work, and she was later to be severely criticized for making the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe look 'effeminate' in her portrait of him. This in no way harmed her friendship with the slightly younger Goethe.
Generally, it was the very softness, gracefulness and gently elegiac mood of Kauffmann's paintings that drew the approval of her contemporaries, for whom they embodied the artistic ideal of 'sensibility'. In creating her history paintings, in which women frequently play a major role, she succeeded in entering an almost exclusively male domain. It was a precondition of her outstanding success as an artist that her works and her personality accorded perfectly with contemporary notions of femininity.
In Self-portrait Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting she shows herself reluctantly bidding farewell to Music, personified by a female figure crowned with a wreath of flowers, and turning to Painting who points energetically to a temple of fame in the distance. In her youth Kauffmann had toyed with the idea of pursuing a career as a singer, and in this painting she transforms this episode in her life into an ambitious, complex history painting that contains references to two Classical subjects: Hercules at the Crossroads and the Three Graces.
Kauffmann spent a large part of her life in Rome and in London, where her house became a centre of social activity Among the few women of her time to acquire considerable wealth from the pursuit of an artistic career, she was extremely prolific until shortly before her death. She produced approximately five hundred portraits and countless history paintings. Elected to the Academies in Bologna, Florence and Rome, she was founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which thereafter did not accept another woman as member until 1923.
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Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807): Angelica Kauffman was first trained by her father and then studied art in Italy. She came to England in 1766 where she followed a career as a professional artist. She was a founding member of the Royal Academy. She later went to Rome where she received royal commissions. Trained in the Neo-classical tradition, Kaufmann's works involved Greco-Roman and allegorical subjects. She was also a portrait painter, but was equally skilled in the rendering of abstract themes.
References: Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self-Portraits by Frances Borzello, pp. 79-82; Women, Art and Society, by Whitney Chadwick, pp. 152-160; Women Artists: An Illustrated History by Nancy G. Heller, pp.52,55,57,80; Angelica Kauffmann by Dorothy Moulton; Women Artists, by Wendy Slatkin
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Angelica Kauffman won international acclaim as a painter, printmaker and decorative artist. She was a founder member of London's Royal Academy of Arts, and friend of some of the leading cultural figures of her age, including Goethe and Reynolds, whose portrait she painted, and who, in turn, portrayed her.
Kauffman was bom in Switzerland, but had her earliest art training in Italy. She was taught by her father, who was a painter, and also copied and leamt from the works of art in the great museums such as the Uffizi. Kauffman came to know the major artists and historians of early Neodassicism working in Italy, induding Benjamin West, Pompeo Batoni and Nathaniel Dance, and she began to establish her reputation by painting fashionable gentlemen on the Grand Tour.
Arriving in London in 1766, Kauffman remained for fifteen years. She became hugely successful, taking a house with a studio in Golden Square and marrying the decorative artist Antonio Zucchi. In her biography of Kauffman (Gerrards Cross 1972} Dorothy Moulton-Meyer quotes a letter in which Goethe wrote about his friend's demanding career: 'She is tired of commissions, but her old husband thinks it wonderful that so much money should roll in for what is often easy work- She would like to paint to please herself and have more leisure to study and take pains.' Kauffman's success was made possible by the expanding European market for consumable culture among the upper, and growing middle, classes, founded
on the wealth pouring in from the colonies and the slave trade. She painted for wealthy patrons, and engravings of her work sold in the burgeoning print market to those with less money.
Culture was not simply pleasurable. It was a badge of class status for the consumer, and could also be a means of proclaiming the superiority of the
Western world, with its roots reaching back to classical antiquity. Kauffman's stay in London coincided with the height of the taste for the Neoclassical. Her knowledge of the most current understanding and representation of classical culture placed her at the centre of the London art world- It gave her the grounding to undertake history painting, considered in some influential circles to be the highest form of art, a field of practice closed to most women, who were not able to undertake sustained study of classical culture and were usually barred from the study of human anatomy. The botanical artist Mary Delany described viewing Kauffman's history painting in London in 1771: 'This morning we have been to see Mr West's and Mrs Angelica's paintings... My partiality leans to my sister painter. She certainly has a great deal of merit, but 1 like her history still better than her portraits.'
One of Kauffman's most important history subjects was taken from classical literature: the story of Penelope, wife of Odysseus, heroine of the Odyssey. This was an extremely unusual choice, and in Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England (London 1992) Wendy Wassyng Roworth argues that the artist's motivation lay in the fact that, rather than being a passive victim or an eroticised bare-breasted figure, Penelope was 'a suitable character through which Kauffman
could advertise her talents', having been 'gifted by Athena herself with a talent for womanly handicraft and a clever, crafty mind'.8 Left by her husband, who was fighting in the Trojan wars, Penelope fought off rapacious suitors, anxious to get their hands upon Odysseus's estate, and his wife. She declared that she would not remarry until she had finished her weaving, and secretly unravelled her work each night.
Kauffman's self-portraits celebrated her gifts. In Self-Portrait at the Age of 13 (1754. Tiroler Landesmuseum, Innsbruck), the young girl holds up sheet music,
drawing attention to the diversity of her talents, and a painting of 1791 shows her hesitating between two female figures symbolising the arts of music and painting (Nostell Priory, West Yorkshire). In a self-portrait painted for the Uffizi collection (1787), Kauffman sits with portfolio and paintbrush, wearing a cameo at her waist,
symbolising her knowledge of classical culture. Also figuring large in Kauffman's oeuvre are portraits of some of the most celebrated people of her time. These include the society beauty Elizabeth Foster (later Duchess of Devonshire) and the novelist Cornelia Knight, who supported herself and her mother through her writing. Kauffman also portrayed a young woman. Miss Conway who would later become known as the amateur artist Anne Seymour Darner. The Portrait of a Lady
of c.1795 is typical of Kauffman's work, showing the sitter with the signs of culture, writing implements, a book, and a statue of Minerva, Roman goddess of intellectual and artistic activity. Several of her female sitters were painted in Western versions of 'Turkish' dress, which was fashionable, and also suggested the harem, a female
world that could have resonated with
the female sitter's experience of a woman artist's studio.
Kauffman also designed decorative schemes. Her four oval paintings for the new Royal Academy (which moved to Somerset House on the Strand in London in 1779) are now set into the ceiling of the Academy's current home, Burlington House, Piccadilly. They show allegorical female figures representing Invention, Composition, Design and Colour. Kauffman's designs were used to decorate everything from porcelain to books, fans and furniture. Her decorative skill and the elegant delicacy of her style have sometimes led to Kauffman's dismissal as a minor artist. But it must be remembered that decorative design was not merely the province of'frivolous' women. Kauffman's husband made his living in this way.
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Samples of Work
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