ANGELICA KAUFFMAN at the ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON on the 23rd, MAY 2024

 

ANGELICA KAUFFMAN at the ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON on the 23rd, MAY 2024

Self-portrait in the traditional costume of the Bregenz Forest, 1781 by Angelica Kauffman

Angelica Kauffman was born in 1741 in Chur, Switzerland and trained and worked in Italy.  Her gender meant that she was unable to gain access to an apprenticeship in the workshop of a master but, under her father’s influence who was an Austrian muralist and painter, she gained practical artistic skills.  She left Italy in 1766 and moved to London where she was a Founding Member of the Royal Academy.  In 1782 she moved again and settled in Rome.

Design, 1778-80 by Angelica Kauffman


Kauffman was a society portraitist whose work was steeped in classicism, Greek columns, ancient sculptures and busts, but also heroic narratives like Ulysses and Anthony and Cleopatra.  Her male contemporaries like Joshua Reynolds referenced the work of the Old Masters, the traditional lineage of almost exclusively male artists from Giotto onwards.  For Kauffman classicism seemed to be a substitute for the traditions of the Masters, that the likes of Reynolds could easily summon up.  Consequently, Kauffman tended to neglect religious subject matter, although there are one or two exceptions such as Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1796), a work exhibited at her funeral in Rome in 1807.  She pioneered history painting and was one of the first artists to paint scenes from British history.

Cleopatra adorning the Tomb of Mark Anthony, 1769-70, by Angelica Kauffman


Kauffman was a very successful society portraitist who established herself in a male-dominated society, in an age of chancers, rakes, hucksters and frauds.  Kauffman fell foul of this society when she married a fake ‘Count’, Frederick de Horn in 1767, an imposter and a fortune hunter, only to have the marriage annulled the following year.  In 1781 she married Venetian painter, Antonio Zucchi.  Her portraits encompass figures like the archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1764), dramatist David Garrick (1795), and Joshua Reynolds posing beside a bust of the artist he most wished to resemble, Michaelangelo (1767).  Kauffman arrived in London in June 1766 and opened a studio first in Suffolk Street, Charing Cross, later at Golden Square in Soho.  She was promoted by Joshua Reynolds, first President of the Royal Academy, and is partly included in a group portrait of the thirty-two founding members who happened to include two women.  The Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771-2), painted by Johann Zoffany, are gathered to look at nude male models but, for spuriously ‘moral’ reasons women could not be present and are included as two bust portraits on the wall.  Presumably someone or possibly everyone might have got excited if women had been admitted.  The impression of homo-erotic longing and repression are all included in this rather sad pre-Freudian scene.

Portraits of Domenica Morghen and Maddalena Volpato as Muses of Tragedy and Comedy, 1791, by Angelica Kauffman


Kauffman broke the male monopoly and the most tangible product of this are her self-portraits.  She wears local Swiss costume or poses with a bust of the goddess Pallas Athena.  Her palpable threat to the male monopoly is both detonated and defused by the contrasts and contexts that she produces.  Like the self-portraits of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Kauffman provides a running commentary through these works about the vicissitudes of fortune, the role of women in a profession that they are refused entry to, and the ideal of success and survival.

Self-portrait with Bust of Minerva, 1780-81, by Angelica Kauffman


Paul Murphy, Royal Academy, May 23rd, 2024

 

Portrait of Joshua Reynolds, 1767, by Angelica Kauffman

 

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