Angelika Kauffmann

Angelika Kauffmann – A child prodigy between painting and music

Angelika Kauffmann was born on 30 October 1741 in Chur in the Free State of the Three Leagues in Switzerland. Her parents, the fresco and portrait painter Joseph Johann Kaufmann and midwife Cleophea Lutz, recognised their daughter’s dual artistic gift and encouraged her singing and painting. As regular schooling for girls was barely possible at that time, her parents taught her reading and writing and several languages – Angelika Kauffmann mastered German, Italian, English and French and was already considered a child prodigy at the age of six. She spent much of her childhood in the palaces and mansions of Italy because her father served the earl of Salis and the Duke Modena d’Este. She grew even closer to her father following the early death of her mother and accompanied him on trips and assisted him in his work. Angelika Kauffmann finally decided on a career as painter and renounced further education in her second great gift, that of music. The artist addressed the difficult struggle around this decision forty years later in her Self Portrait Hesitating Between the Arts of Painting and Music.

Breakthrough as portrait painter

The trips with her father proved educational and inspirational for Angelika Kauffmann. An extended sojourn in Italy in particular had a positive effect on the development of the artist, and she was accepted at a young age in the art academies of Bologna, Florence, Venice and Rome. In Rome she painted the portrait of the archaeologist Johann Joachim Winkelmann and with this work suddenly became famous. This led to numerous portraits of famous celebrities whom she met on her travels in Italy, whilst the picture of the English actor David Garrick brought her great fame also in England. In 1766, Angelika and her father went to London where the artist made the acquaintance of the great English painter Joshua Reynolds who was taken with the young woman’s abilities, encouraged her strengths, and also made her a futile marriage proposal. The alleged Swedish aristocrat Frederick de Horn had more luck and they married in 1767. The fairytale prince, however, turned out to be a marriage swindler who took all her savings. Her second marriage to the elderly painter Antonio Zucchi was more fortunate, a union her father had arranged a few months before his death. 

Angelika Kauffmann was on a par with the greats of her time

Angelika Kauffmann cultivated numerous friendships with significant personalities of her time. Johann Gottried Herder saw her as “Europe’s most cultivated woman”, whilst Goethe presented his Iphigenia for her to review and was pleased with her praise. The painter in turn portrayed the poet – and afterwards had to be told by Goethe that the ‘handsome lad’ in her picture had nothing in common with him at all. Following the death of her husband, Kauffmann took a step back but remained a significant artistic figure. Angelika Kauffmann died from a serious illness on 5 November 1807 in Rome. Her funeral turned into a vast procession of artists with her coffin carried by the professors of the academy, led by her friend Antonio Canova. Her bust was exhibited in the Pantheon next to that of Raphael.