In her essential essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in 1972, Linda Nochlin warns against “digging up worthy or insufficiently appreciated women”. She gives two examples: Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelica Kauffman, both “worth the effort . . . but they do nothing to question the assumptions lying behind the question . . . The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists”.
Nochlin’s question inaugurated feminist art history, transforming reputations. Artemisia is now so popular that we are on first-name terms. Raped then tortured when giving evidence in court, she is feminism’s avenging angel — for her violence on canvas, her gutsy descriptions of bodily pain and pleasure: Judith murdering Holofernes, martyred St Catherine, ecstatic Mary Magdalene. The National Gallery’s 2020 show was a knockout.
The Royal Academy’s new Angelica Kauffman exhibition is not. Kauffman ticks all the boxes for 21st-century resurrection: she made it big in a man’s world, her history paintings focus on strong women, she defied the male gaze to depict her female friends on their own terms, she created and zealously defended her “brand” image. Only one vital thing is missing: she was never an interesting painter.
Conventional even according to the neoclassicism of her time, she developed a flawless facture where refined fluid brushwork, softly modulated colours, subtle glazes render flesh porcelain-smooth, and bring a dash of rococo breeziness — but not the light of inner experience. Fatally, Kauffman cannot move us, although we can respect her strategies as a female artist.
For her aristocratic women sitters, such as “Martha Cocks in Turkish Dress”, for example, she invented settings of oriental costumes and luxurious informal interiors, evoking the private female space of the harem without the erotic frisson. The problem? A desexed harem is dull. So too Kauffman’s demure historic heroines, representing female agency, dignity under pressure, without challenging male power: “Penelope at Her Loom”, “Eleanora Sucking the Venom Out of the Wound of Her Husband, King Edward I”.
The only way this exhibition works, therefore, is at the interstices between art and social history. Born in Switzerland in 1741, Kauffman was a child prodigy, taught and marketed by her artist father, feted from London to Rome, a founder member of the Royal Academy. Through canny self-promotion and negotiation with patriarchal tradition, determining what and how she painted, she achieved exceptional fame and wealth for a female artist in the 18th century. She shows what was possible in transcending gender boundaries — and what wasn’t.
The self-portraits introducing her — rosy-cheeked, smiling, pretty without being threatening — are very carefully staged. In “Self-portrait in the Traditional Costume of the Bregenz Forest”, she looks out, frank, clear-eyed, from beneath a quaint black hat jauntily perched on neat braids, loyally announcing her Austro-Swiss roots, smartly playing to tropes of rustic innocence (Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile was published when Kauffman was 21).
“Self-portrait in all’antica Dress” is its sophisticated twin: Kauffman as a vestal virgin robed in white, the folds of her drapery as chiselled as those of a sculpted Greek goddess. Seated in a loggia, framed by a crimson curtain, brushes and palette to hand, she is at once creator and muse. Joshua Reynolds called her “Miss Angel”, the poet Gottfried von Herder “a heavenly creature”.
Divine inspiration was her logo. She summons the goddess of wisdom, victory and the arts in “Self-portrait with Bust of Minerva”. She dares personify drawing — disegno was traditionally embodied as male — in “Self-portrait in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry”. She boasts of her gifts as a singer as well as a painter in “Self-portrait at the Crossroads between the Arts of Music and Painting”.
It seems vain, narcissistic, this repeated dramatising of the emergence of her creative self, until you remember that there were then no models of a woman painter: Kauffman was inventing an identity. Always dressed in flowing white, she conflates virginal purity with religious dedication to her painterly vocation, like a nun.
Women in the arts — actresses, musicians — in the 18th century were considered available if not a step away from prostitution. Kauffman wanted to be taken seriously: she emphasises her modesty, erudition, classical allusions to what art historian Johann Winckelmann called “noble simplicity and serene grandeur”. She came to notice in Rome painting his portrait, pausing a moment, deep in thought, at his desk. The delicate features and gentle colouring express their shared ideals of harmony.
At the RA, Winckelmann hangs alongside Kauffman’s portrait of David Garrick, which made her name in Britain (she lived in London from 1766 to 1781). Elbow leaning on the back of a chair, hand gripping the top rail, the actor swivels round to throw us an amused if wary glance. Pose and gesture derive from Frans Hals, and give a fresh behind-the-scenes aspect to the actor, generally depicted by men — Reynolds, Hogarth, Johann Zoffany — mid-performance, in heroic declamation. Kauffman strips away the mask. Her Garrick is casual, hovering between uncertainty and flirtation — no longer controlling his audience, intrigued at watching Kauffman’s painterly performance.
It speaks volumes about pressures of gender expectation that Kauffman’s freest, liveliest paintings portray her male contemporaries. So much historic portraiture is famous men depicting famous men, a competition of egos. Kauffman’s sympathetic approach suggests conversation, not posturing. Reynolds, didactic champion of idealising portraiture, in Kauffman’s rendering is the reverse: an approachable middle-aged man with receding hairline, questioning expression, at ease among disorganised piles of books.
Kauffman’s singular position, a woman with her own studio where male guests such as Reynolds visited, inevitably stirred gossip. Nathaniel Hone painted a scurrilous image of several artists cavorting naked, Reynolds’ ear trumpet directed between Kauffman’s legs. Kauffman demanded the RA withdraw the painting — and they did.
Her social position protected her when she made an error in 1767, marrying a conman and bigamist. The marriage was dissolved and her reputation (and, she insisted publicly, her virginity) remained intact. But you see why, in 1769, she painted “Cleopatra Adorning the Tomb of Mark Antony” — the Egyptian femme fatale as a decorous, flower-scattering widow rather than the sultry heroine of male imagining, for instance Reynolds’ “Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl”.
Brand Angelica survived revolutionary upheaval in Europe. Kauffman ended her days in Rome with a Venetian husband, a papal commission, faithful friends including Goethe, and such renown that when French troops occupied the city in 1798, her studio was spared looting. She worked indefatigably for that prestige within the male establishment. How ironic that if these paintings were by a man, today we would not look at them at all.
On show at The Royal Academy of Arts until June 30
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