Maria Anna Angelika Kauffmann (1741 –1807)

• Was a Swiss Neoclassical painter who had a successful career in London and Rome.
• Remembered primarily as a history painter, Kauffmann was a skilled portraitist, landscape and decoration painter.
• She was, along with Mary Moser, one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy in London in 1768.
• There Kauffman studied works by the Old Masters, and had her first painting sent to a public exhibition in London.
• Later in 1763 she visited Rome, returning again in 1764.
• From Rome she passed to Bologna and Venice, everywhere feted for her talents and charm.
• Writing from Rome in August 1764 to his friend Franke, Winckelmann refers to her popularity; she was then painting his picture, a half-length; of which she also made an etching.
• She spoke Italian as well as German, he says, and expressed herself with facility in French and English.
• "She may be styled beautiful," he adds, "and in singing may vie with our best virtuosi".
• In 1765, her work appeared in England in an exhibition of the Free Society of Artists.
• She moved to England shortly after and established herself as a leading artist.
• In 1767 Kauffman was seduced by an imposter going under the name Count Frederick de Horn, whom she married, but they were separated the following year.
• She spent several months in Ireland in 1771, as a guest of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and undertook a number of portrait commissions there.
• From 1769 until 1782 Kauffman was an annual exhibitor with the Royal Academy, sending sometimes as many as seven pictures, generally on classical or allegoric subjects.
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