Angelica Kauffman: Breaking Through the 18th-Century Glass Ceiling

In the late 18th century, Angelica Kauffman was famous throughout Europe, one of the leading international painters of the day. A success in London, Venice and Rome, she attracted commissions from Catherine the Great, the Emperor of Austria and the Pope. She was a close friend of Goethe, a founding member of Britain's Royal Academy. When she died in 1807, her lavish funeral in Rome drew enormous crowds.

A far from ordinary life, then. And for an 18th-century woman in the male-dominated world of art, an utterly extraordinary one. She achieved equal pay, got women wearing trousers, drew male nudes and even had a pre-nup.

It's a story that's arrestingly told in Angelica Kauffman: Artist, Superwoman, Influencer, a fine exhibition now on at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf that will be heading to London, and naturally the Royal Academy, this summer.

Kauffman was born in Chur in eastern Switzerland in 1741 and was a child prodigy, not just as a painter but also as a singer. She had art lessons from her father and music lessons from her mother, but after the death of her mother in 1757 she chose painting. Nearly 40 years later, she painted this recollection of herself placed at the Crossroads between the Arts of Music and Painting, torn between the two careers. The personification of painting, on the right, points to the steep path that leads to the temple of fame.

This picture is now in the National Trust-owned Nostell Priory in Yorkshire, and a lot of the works in this show come from British stately homes, the owners of which were just as Angelica-mad as the rest of Europe. Indeed, prints of works by Kauffman adorned walls in many other houses, and her pictures also found their way onto fine porcelain from Meissen or Vienna, or indeed onto less precious plates and chamber pots; you can see a selection of such wares in the exhibition, as well as a recreation of a wall of her prints.

But Kauffman's self-portraits place herself rather above the everyday business of creating and selling art. They're a bit idealised. Here, in this rather refined image made in her late 20s, she's elegantly dressed, with her stylus for drawing scarcely noticeable in the corner of the picture. 

Kauffman spent her first years as a fully-fledged painter in Italy and soon began taking commissions from British travellers on the Grand Tour. One of them was the famed Shakespearean actor David Garrick, seen here in a portrait that helped establish Kauffman's reputation in London when it was exhibited in 1765.

Kauffman set up her own studio in London in 1766 and stayed until 1781. She was so highly regarded, she could charge the same fees as Joshua Reynolds, Britain's leading portrait painter and the first president of the RA.

Now there's a fair selection of Kauffman's portraits on show here, and like the Garrick painting, some of them are rather impressive. But was she in the same league as Reynolds or other British contemporaries like Thomas Gainsborough and Joseph Wright of Derby? Well, no, at least not consistently. You can stand in front of a picture like The Family of the Earl of Gower and think that some of the faces are rather awkward, rather undefined.

But in fact, the art in this show is perhaps less interesting and important than the story behind it. Kauffman was an art superstar in an era when women weren't supposed to be. She painted pictures whose narratives were sometimes rather feminist, long before the term began to be applied, and she was a pioneer in quite a few other ways, too.

Shockingly for her contemporaries, Kauffman drew male nudes when she was in Rome in her early 20s. A few months earlier, she'd been in Florence, where it was considered improper for her to even work in the same studio as male colleagues. Kauffman was tricked into a secret first marriage in 1767, which was rapidly annulled, and when she got married again, in 1781 to the Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi, it was only after signing a pre-nuptial agreement.

So Kauffman certainly has a claim to have been at the forefront of any incipient 18th-century women's liberation movement, and she was certainly one of the first Western artists to depict a woman wearing trousers. Turkish-style dress was all the rage in about 1774 when she painted Mary Lennox, the Duchess of Richmond, in this exotic outfit. Connotations not just of emancipation, but also of the mysteries of the harem, perhaps, in the nicest possible way.

Kauffman was admitted to five art academies -- four in Italy as well as the RA -- which was an extraordinary achievement for a woman at the time. She was in fact one of two founding women members of the RA (albeit with much less freedom than their male colleagues). It would be more than 150 years before another female was allowed in.

It's a measure of Kauffman's standing that she was commissioned to paint allegories for the ceiling of the RA's council chamber on the academic theory of painting. This one from a set of four represents colour, with a chameleon at the foot of the female figure who's dipping her brush into a rainbow.

These are, the curators say, the only known wall or ceiling paintings by an 18th-century woman artist. That's absolutely remarkable.

The second half of this show is perhaps less enthralling than the first. Kauffman made many history paintings, full of classical subject matter, putting herself on a par with any of her male peers. Frankly, 18th-century paintings of scenes from antiquity are not the sort of thing we get very enthusiastic about today. But it is enlightening to see how Kauffman's versions of these often-depicted stories focus less on the heroes going off to war, more on the women left behind. And in this picture of Cleopatra Decorating the Tomb of Mark Anthony, we see Cleopatra not as a scheming seductress but as a bereft lover.

Agrippina Mourning over the Ashes of Germanicus gives us a more intimate reading of the tale than a male artist would, shrinking what is normally a theatrical, multi-character scene to a single moment of self-absorption. Again, it's the emotion that counts -- a reflection on death -- not the historical event.

While you can appreciate her innovations in history painting, it's the portraits that are most appealing, and in an era that saw the rise of the celebrity, there's one here of Emma Hamilton, surely the prototypical it girl, seen by celebrity painter Angelica Kauffman.

As we went round, we found some parallels between Kauffman and the slightly younger Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the subject of a big exhibition in Paris a few years back. Vigée Le Brun was another artist who found herself recognised and in demand around Europe, but she was a portraitist pure and simple. Kauffman, though, was a phenomenon, and this is a really interesting story from art history, well worth a visit, whether in Dusseldorf or London.

Practicalities

Kauffman: Artist, Superwoman, Influencer is on at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf until May 24. The museum is open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1100 to 1800, with lates on Thursdays till 2100. A ticket for the exhibition plus the Kunstpalast's collection costs 10 euros, which is really rather good value by any standards. Allow yourself a couple of hours to see this show.

The Kunstpalast is situated close to the River Rhine, north of Dusseldorf's old centre. It's a good half-hour walk from the city's main rail station, Düsseldorf Hbf, but two underground rail stations -- Nordstrasse and Tonhalle/Ehrenhof, both with direct services from Düsseldorf Hbf -- are a few minutes from the gallery on foot.

The Kauffman exhibition reopens at the Royal Academy in London on June 28.

Images

Angelica Kauffman, Self-Portrait at the Crossroads between the Arts of Music and Painting, 1794, Nostell Priory, West Yorkshire. © National Trust Images/John Hammond

Angelica Kauffman, Self-Portrait with Stylus, c. 1768, Private collection. © Private collection/Photo: AKRP, Justin Piperger
Angelica Kauffman, Portrait of David Garrick, 1764, The Burghley House Collection, Stamford
Angelica Kauffman, Portrait of Mary Lennox, née Bruce, Duchess of Richmond in Turkish Dress, c. 1774, The Trustees of the Goodwood Collection, West Sussex
Angelica Kauffman, Colouring, c. 1780, Royal Academy of Arts, London. © Royal Academy of Arts. Photo: John Hammond

Angelica Kauffman, Cleopatra Decorating the Tomb of Mark Anthony, c. 1769/70, The Burghley House Collection, Stamford. © The Burghley House Collection/Photo: AKRP, Inken Holubec
Angelica Kauffman, Agrippina Mourning over the Ashes of Germanicus, 1793, Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf
Angelica Kauffman, Portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton, as Muse of Comedy, 1791, Private collection c/o Omnia Art Ltd