REVIEW | Angelica Kauffman – Royal Academy of Arts

Angelica Kauffman was one of the Founding Members of the Royal Academy of Arts, yet it’s taken an embarassingly long time for her to receive a solo show in her own institution. Postponed due to COVID following an initial run at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, her time to shine has finally come.

This is not a particularly large show. As a result, it offers quite a general overview of her life and career. One of only two female artists to be Founding Members – the other being Mary Moser – her likeness is only represented by a portrait on the wall in Johan Zoffany’s Academician’s group portrait set in the life drawing room; women were excluded from the life class on moral grounds. Her reputation, however, was significant in the late 18th century.

Kauffman was remarkably well-connected, painting portraits of society’s prestigious members in England and Italy like the actor David Garrick, art historian Johann Winckelmann, and her artist-friend Joshua Reynolds. But she is better known for her emphasis on portraying female sitters, including herself.

A major force in the popular tradition of history painting, Kauffman is like a neo-classical version of Artemisia Gentileschi. She painted her female friends and clients as graceful classical muses, and inserted herself as personifications of the arts. Two of her tondi are shown with their four oil sketches; the other half of the group are due for display at Tate Britain’s Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 exhibition (16 May – 13 October 2024).

As one letter written to the Council of the Royal Academy on April 1775 attests, Kauffman was also fiercely aware when she was being ridiculed, requesting that Nathaniel Hone’s The Conjuror be removed from display for its offending imagery which partially targeted her.

In the last room, one also gets a nice look at the invaluable register – Memoria delle pitture fatte d’Angelica Kauffman – maintained by her second husband, Antonio Zucchi, meticulously recording all the pictures the artist had done upon her return to Italy, offering dates, detailed desciptions, and price charged per work. Every painting exhibited in this room can be identified in the register; we are only shown the first page with her earlier works from October 1781, so you can’t actually match them in person, sadly.

I like this exhibition for its brevity, while also wishing it could have been fleshed out into a larger monograph. Nevertheless, it’s a great introduction for most people. I always felt she was a fairly emblematic painter of the neoclassical tradition – pretty, sweet, relief-like, and a little emotionless – but I was thrilled to discover she was a painter of textures and impasto too.