Portal:Austria/Selected biography/24

Angelica Kauffmann

Angelica Kauffman (30 October 1741 – 5 November 1807) was a Neoclassical painter.

She grew up in Vorarlberg, where her family originated from. By her twelfth year she had become a notable painter in the region, with bishops and nobles for her sitters. She lived and worked in Italy and later England, where she became close friends with Sir Joshua Reynolds. Kauffmann's strength was her work in history painting, the most elite and lucrative category in academic painting during the 18th century. Under the direction of Reynolds, the Academy made a strong effort to promote history painting to a native audience who were more interested in commissioning and buying portraits and landscapes.

Despite the popularity that Kauffmann enjoyed in English society and her success as an artist, she ultimately left England for the continent. She retired to Rome, where she became friends with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom she painted. She is known by the numerous engravings from her designs by Schiavonetti, Bartolozzi and others.

The first biography about her life was already written three years after her death in 1810 by Giovanni de Rossi. It has also been used as the basis of a romance by Leon de Wailly (1838) and it prompted the novel contributed by Anne Isabella Thackeray to the Cornhill Magazine in 1875 entitled Miss Angel.