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Angelica (Maria Anna
Catharina) Kauffmann was a Swiss painter in the early Neoclassical style
who is best known for her decorative wall paintings for residences designed
by Robert Adam.
The daughter
of Johann Joseph Kauffmann, a painter, Angelica was a precocious child
and a talented musician and painter by her 12th year. Her early
paintings were influenced by the French Rococo works of Henri Gravelot
and François Boucher. In 1754 and 1763 she visited Italy, and while in
Rome she was influenced by the Neoclassicism of
Anton Raphael Mengs.
She was induced
by Lady Wentworth, wife of the English ambassador, to accompany her to
London in 1766. She was well received and was particularly favoured by
the royal family. Sir Joshua Reynolds became a close friend, and most
of the numerous portraits and self-portraits done in her English period
were influenced by his style of portrait painting. Her name is found among
the signatories to the petition for the establishment of the Royal Academy,
and in its first catalogue of 1769 she is listed as a member. During the
1770s Kauffmann was one of a team of artists who supplied the painted
decorations for Adam-designed interiors (e.g., the house at 20 Portman
Square, London; now the Courtauld Institute Galleries). Kauffmann retired
to Rome in the early 1780s with her second husband, the Venetian painter
Antonio Zucchi.
Kauffmann's
pastoral and mythological compositions portray gods and goddesses in a
delicate and graceful if somewhat insipid fashion. Her paintings are Rococo
in tone and approach, though her figures are given Neoclassical poses
and draperies. Kauffmann's portraits of female sitters are among her finest
works.
Works
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