Enfilade

Angelica Kauffman, Portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton, as Muse of Comedy, detail, 1791, oil on canvas, 127 × 102 cm
(Private collection)

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A version of the exhibition appeared in 2020 at Düsseldorf’s Kunstpalast and was intended to arrive much sooner at the Royal Academy but was derailed by Covid. The show opens next month (hooray!). . .

Angelica Kauffman
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1 March — 30 June 2024

Curated by Bettina Baumgärtel and Per Rumberg, with Annette Wickham

Angelica Kauffman RA (1741–1807) was one of the most celebrated artists of the 18th century. In this major exhibition, we trace her trajectory from child prodigy to one of Europe’s most sought-after painters.

Known for her celebrity portraits and pioneering history paintings, Angelica Kauffman helped to shape the direction of European art. She painted some of the most influential figures of her day—queens, countesses, actors and socialites—and she reinvented the genre of history painting by focusing largely on female protagonists from classical history and mythology. This exhibition covers Kauffman’s life and work: her rise to fame in London, her role as a founding member of the Royal Academy, and her later career in Rome where her studio became a hub for the city’s cultural life. See paintings and preparatory drawings by Kauffman, including some of her finest self-portraits and her celebrated ceiling paintings for the Royal Academy’s first home in Somerset House, as well as history paintings of subjects including Circe and Cleopatra, and discover the remarkable life of the artist whom one of her contemporaries described as “the most cultivated woman in Europe.”

The exhibition is curated by Bettina Baumgärtel, Head of the Department of Painting at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, and Per Rumberg, Curator at the Royal Academy, with Annette Wickham, Curator of Works on Paper at the Royal Academy.

Bettina Baumgärtel and Annette Wickham, Angelica Kauffman (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2024), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1915815033, £20 / $30.

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Note (added 15 February 2024) — Wendy Wassyng Roworth’s review of  the 2020 exhibition catalogue appeared in The Woman’s Art Journal 42.1 (Spring/Summer 2021): 46–48.