Kauffmann, Angelica

She was a Swiss painter. Her father, Joseph Johann Kauffmann, was a painter primarily focused on portraiture. She began painting at a very young age, assisting her father in mural decorations for several churches, traveling with him through Switzerland, Austria, and northern Italy. By the age of fifteen, she was already painting portraits independently. In 1762, she was in Florence, where she engaged with artistic circles linked to Neoclassical currents.

In 1763, she moved to Rome, a central hub of Neoclassical theory. There, she encountered prominent figures in the art world, such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Pompeo Batoni, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. In 1765, she was appointed a member of the Accademia di San Luca. That same year, she left Rome for Venice, where she studied the work of Titian and his contemporaries and met Lady Wentworth, the wife of the English ambassador, who encouraged her to visit England.

Between 1766 and 1781, she resided in London, where she befriended artists such as Joshua Reynolds, with whom she co-founded the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1757, she married a supposed Swedish nobleman, the Count of Horn, who turned out to be an impostor and bigamist. After her husband's death in 1780, she annulled her marriage and married the painter Antonio Zucchi, with whom she returned to Italy. Unlike other female painters of her time, she refused to confine herself to portraits and still life, and devoted herself to historical compositions, a genre considered the most prestigious of her era. Nevertheless, the English society, where she achieved her greatest artistic and personal success, continued to prefer portraits over grand historical themes. Kauffmann gained significant acclaim for her allegorical portraits, where she depicted her clients as historical figures or gods from classical mythology, in the style of Reynolds (Pancorbo, A. in: Enciclopedia M.N.P., 2006, vol. IV, p. 1360).