What was it like to be a woman painter in the eighteenth century? Perhaps the image of a decorator comes up in the mind of some males as if women were only good at formulating colour schemes for a new apartment. Here, however, we are dealing with one of the finest professional portrait and history painters who also happened to be a founder member of the Royal Academy. Moreover she was not even British but Swiss. Angelica Kauffman was born in Chur in 1741 and died in Rome in 1807 and came from a relatively poor family. Her father was a good muralist and his travels for work in central Europe enabled Angelica to pick up not only his skills but also four languages.

Not only in the visual arts but also in music Angelica started to excel: she was a good musician and singer but gave up opera when a priest told her it was a ‘seedy’ profession. Later in life Kauffman depicted this difficult choice in her life in the following allegorical painting:

When Angelica was sixteen her mother died and she and her father moved to Italy where she became a member of Florence’s Accademia delle Belle Arti. In Rome Angelica met the British community there and her portraits of them became popular. So popular in fact that she decided to come to the United Kingdom accompanied by the wife of the British ambassador. In London Angelica became friends with Sir Joshua Reynolds and through him was one of the founder members of the Royal Academy, the only woman member, apart from the celebrated painter Mary Moser, to be a Royal Academician until the twentieth century.

Although Angelica’s portraits of friends and notables were (and continue to be highly prized) with their incisive, harmonious and vivid colours combined with a multi-layered application of paint she regarded herself primarily as a painter of historical subjects such as the ones shown here:

Disappointed at the apparent lack of interest in these Kauffman moved to Rome. Her move was also prompted by two incidents. First was a satirical painting referring to her relationship with Reynolds which she managed to have withdrawn from a Royal Academy exhibition. Second was her short marriage to an impostor who tried to grab her money. (Later in life Kauffman remarried, this time happily.)

In Rome Angelica continued her professional career as a painter and befriended many cultivated persons including Goethe and Winkelman some of whose portraits she painted.

Angelica Kauffman’s funeral was a grand affair arranged by neoclassical sculptor Canova, recently the subject of a fine exhibition at Lucca’s Cavallerizza. Indeed, Angelica can herself be regarded as a neoclassical artist especially with regard to her historical canvases and the poses of the figures in her paintings which are inspired by ancient sculptures.

I was able to make up my own mind regarding Angela Kauffman’s artistry at the current Royal Academy’s exhibition on her. Visiting the two rooms containing both her portraits and history paintings and including engraved prints of her work which proved very popular during her lifetime I was suitably seduced by Angelica’s skills in portraying her sitters whether they be the nobility or Lady Hamilton or that great classical scholar Winkelmann, murdered in Rome aged fifty in 1768 by his gay lover.

Angelica Kauffman’s historical pictures showed her virtuosity in depicting anatomy (how could she as a woman have attended life classes at the R.A. in the eighteenth century?) and composing complex groups of personages. However, lacking deeper knowledge of the subjects presented, I found Angelica’s portraits much more interesting. Already I could envisage the transition from the Baroque to a lighter Rococo style and even the hints of an impeding proto romanticism in the more fluid brush-strokes.

What a woman! I thought. Beauty and brains combined in Angelica. Her character was apparently full of charm but also ambitious. She needed to be in an age when women had to be at least twice, if not three times, as good as men in carrying out their profession. It was a truly worthwhile visit to this Swiss painter’s oeuvre especially since so many of her paintings are in private collections and, therefore, not normally accessible to the general public.

It was a happy coincidence that Switzerland had already appeared on our cultural horizon a couple of days previously at an organ concert given in the church of Saint Margaret Lothbury by Marc Fitze, titular organist at the HeiliggeistKirche in Berne. On one of the finest classical organs in London, built by George Pike England in 1801, Fitze performed a very attractive repertoire ranging from Biber and Galuppi to Lefebure-Wely and Liszt. The concluding piece by romantic composer Jacques Vogt was a Fantasie-orage ‘Scène champetre’ depicting a storm over lake Lucerne. For this piece some stops, by means only known to organists, had their wind-intake modified to imitate the sound of mountain goats. It was all quite charming and realistic! Meanwhile, we are promised more thunderstorms over London today in what promises to be another disappointing Bank holiday.