The life and career of Angelica Kauffmann was an extraordinary one for a woman artist of the 18th century. Born in Switzerland to a poor painter, Angelica nevertheless received a broad education as the only child in the family, and showed prodigious talent as a portraitist and opera singer while still in her teens. Her early mastery of German, French, Italian, and English laid the foundation for her international success as a premier Neoclassical artist and a prominent woman in European elite society.
In her youth, Kauffmann’s father traveled much for work, taking his daughter with him from Switzerland to Austria and Italy. She had already been known as a portraitist by the age of 12, with bishops and nobles sitting for her; and at 15, she was assisting her father in frescoing a church in Vorarlberg, Austria.
Finally, the family moved to Italy where Kauffmann devoted herself to artistic training—studying old master works from famous collections in all the major centers from Milan, Florence, and Rome to Naples, Bologna, and Venice.
Portraits in the Eternal City
While in Italy, the time spent in Rome between 1763–1765 proved most formative for Kauffmann. Artistically, she gained access to some of the best collections of ancient sculpture and Renaissance paintings. She also established important social relationships with German intellectuals and British aristocrats, who had come to the Eternal City on the Grand Tour. She copied works and painted portraits for them—both as clients and friends.One of her sitters was the American physician John Morgan: a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania who later founded the first medical school in colonial America. Morgan studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, after serving in the French and Indian War, and traveled to Italy in 1764 with the Duke of York.
In the portrait, Kauffmann portrayed him as an aspirant young doctor, gesturing toward a letter addressed to a noble. His notebook lies open to the title page with his name and a classicizing seal, which is circumscribed with the words “Primus ego in patriam,” the beginning to a Latin verse from Virgil’s “Georgics” that states, “I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse to my country.”
That same year Angelica met and painted the portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, an erudite German scholar of Greco-Roman antiquity and the foremost proponent of Neoclassicism in the arts. He had been in Italy since 1755, right after the publication of a seminal book that eloquently described the classical aesthetic ideal as “a noble simplicity and silent grandeur.”
The book made Winckelmann famous and was later translated into French and English. In Rome, his knowledge of ancient art won him an appointment in 1763 from Pope Clement XIII as “Prefect of Antiquities” for the Vatican Library. One year later, he published the monumental tome “The History of Art in Antiquity”—a pioneering account of the artistic and cultural development in ancient Greece.
It was during his period of intense scholarly activity that Kauffmann captured Winckelmann’s portrait. With a quill in hand, he toils away at his desk, suspended in a moment of deep thought with the manuscript half-covering a plaster relief of the three Graces. In addition to an oil painting, she also produced the same portrait in etching, disseminating in print the image of the great scholar.
In a letter to a friend, Winckelmann remarked on Kauffmann’s impressive language skills and referred to her exceptional popularity in Rome, especially among English visitors. “She may be styled beautiful,” he wrote, “and in singing may vie with our best virtuosi.” Beyond the artistic patronage, she had probably met the scholar at social gatherings, where she might have entertained the guests with her charming voice.
The acquaintance with Winckelmann and his circles urged Kauffmann to strive toward a classical aesthetic in her art: history painting. As the most elevated and sophisticated genre of painting, history paintings required greater compositional skills and literary knowledge. To represent human action in a historical, narrative painting was the ultimate mark for artistic talent and genius.
Between 1766 and 1781, Kauffmann moved to London and established herself as a leading artist, taking up prestigious commissions. She also co-founded the Royal Academy of Arts where she regularly exhibited.
Network of International Elites
In 1782, while constructing a grandiose library in his family palace, Monsignor Onorato Caetani sought two canvases from Kauffmann, each depicting a scene from the French didactic novel “The Adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulysses.”Written under the reign of Louis XIV by a tutor of his grandson, the classicizing novel was set within the framework of Homer’s “Odyssey,” and recounts the educational travels of the hero’s son. Yet with its denouncement of war, luxury, and the proclamation of the brotherhood of man, the novel’s political critique of the Sun King’s autocratic rule also found a favorable audience among Enlightenment thinkers, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Thomas Jefferson to the learned societies in Rome of which Caetani was a leading member.
Kauffmann painted two episodes where Telemachus and his guide Athena, disguised as the old Mentor, wash up on the shores of Calypso where Telemachus recounts his journey in search of his father Odysseus. In one, the protagonist is entertained by the nymphs while Calypso leads the Mentor away; in the other, Calypso tells her nymphs to stop singing Odysseus’s praises because of his son’s grief. These episodes begin Telemachus’s narration of famous kings and distant lands. For viewers familiar with the story, the scenes bring up the Enlightenment discussions of education and political systems current in 18th-century intellectual circles.
In his “Italian Journey,” Goethe frequently wrote of her as a talented and hardworking artist and a sympathetic woman. “Angelica is always kind and helpful,” he mentions in a correspondence, “and I am indebted to her in more ways than one. We spend every Sunday together and I always visit her on one evening during the week. I simply don’t understand how she can work as hard as she does, yet she always thinks she is doing nothing.”
Angelica died on Nov. 5, 1807 at the age of 66, leaving behind a prolific oeuvre of over 800 works, a rich collection of art and books, and a large fortune. Her funeral, directed by the great Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, was the most splendid since that of Raphael after which it was modeled. Two of her pictures were carried in procession, and a bust was placed in the Pantheon alongside Raphael’s. This association with what was considered the most perfect painter of the Renaissance speaks to the high esteem held of her by contemporaries, and the undiminished legacy of a great woman artist in a world of great men.
