Angelica Kauffman’s funeral in Rome in 1807 was designed by her friend Canova on the model of Raphael’s. The corpse of ‘the great Woman, the always illustrious holy and most pious… was accompanied to the Church by two very numerous Brotherhoods… followed by the rest of the Academicians & Virtuosi who carried in triumph two of her Pictures’. At the Royal Academy in London, the account of her obsequies was read out at the general assembly and entered in the minutes; as a founding member of the institution – one of only two women so honoured, with Mary Moser – Kauffman was gone, but not forgotten.
Kauffman was a decorative artist at heart. She was also a woman capable of falling for a conman
The Swiss-born daughter of a peripatetic Austrian artist, fluent in four languages, Kauffman was a self-proclaimed citizen of nowhere. In one respect, though, she was thoroughly Italian: she knew the value of ‘fare bella figura’. As a teenager with a fine singing voice, she could have made a career in opera but was advised against it by a priest and opted instead for art. By her mid-teens she was painting portraits of Italian bishops; by her twenties she had moved on to British grand tourists. Her success in this market persuaded her to try her luck in London, where she arrived in the spring of 1766, aged 24. By June of that year she had met and charmed Joshua Reynolds, ‘the first English painter’. By October he was calling her ‘Miss Angel’ and writing memos in his notebook to bring her flowers. He painted her portrait and she reciprocated with his, softening his features and taking years off his age. A year later, the Academy’s first president invited her to become a founding member.
As a neoclassical painter trained in Italy, Kauffman emulated the finish of Raphael; she lavished Vaseline on her lens, not least when painting herself.