Angelica Kauffmann

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A founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) was a star. A portrait painter, history painter, printmaker and designer known in her lifetime as one of the wealthiest bourgeois women of her era, she was called "perhaps the most cultivated woman in Europe," by the German philosopher J. G. Herder. History painting might have been the way to prestige, but it was Kauffmann's portraits that opened avenues to an international aristocratic and intellectual social world. This volume gathers approximately 150 works, and is the first publication to rigorously connect them to her personal history and to London and Rome, where she lived. Kauffmann settled permanently in Rome in 1782, and made her home a welcome meeting place for artists and writers. Goethe, a regular, called her a "woman of immense talent," and his assessment is borne out, more than 200 years later, by this study of her work.