Her Work
As she was a ‘skilled portraitist, landscape and decoration painter’, Angelica Kauffmann created many masterpieces.
Angelica Kauffmann's capability to achieve a masterpiece in portraiture like the “Portrait of Sarah Harrop”, unlike other famous artists, was not one achieved through the teachings of books or the writing of papers but through the teachings of her father and her own self.
\/Examples of Joseph Johann Kauffmann's work\/
Before diving into the story of how Kauffmann was capable of achieving the knowledge of male anatomy which the very instruction that women artists were generally denied, one must know Kauffmann’s first introduction into the world of the arts. Joseph Johann Kauffmann, her father, was a skilled Austrian church muralist and painter who took her on as his assistant during which they traveled through Austria, Switzerland, and Italy for work. The influence/encouragement by her father’s teachings through the studying of engravings after the Old Masters and the teachings provided by being his assistant were key aspects in the development of her skills in the public and private collections of Milan, Venice, Bologna, Parma, Florence, Rome and Naples.
After Kauffmann’s beginning guidance/education of the world of arts through her father, the encouragement of various British artists she met during her travels as her father’s assistant, and the German antiquarian named Johann Winckelmann, Kauffmann declared her ambition to become a history painter and sought out the education she needed. During these times the required knowledge to pursue history painting as a career, knowledge of history and literature as well as training in perspective and anatomy, was something locked to anyone that was not a caucasian male. This blockade in Kauffmann's career path of history painter did not stop her from achieving the knowledge she required, Angelica Kauffmann studied/learnt how to render male anatomy by copying drawings and engravings of nudes made by her male colleagues and through the study of antique statuary and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings by greatly admired artists such as the Prince of Painters Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino.
The studying of these fine works of art allowed Kauffmann to achieve something deemed impossible by the world of the time, a woman not only pursuing but achieving a career of high nobility. Kauffmann’s capability to achieve her career of choice (history painter), made her a huge inspiration to women and especially those of lower class as she was born into a poor family and yet was still able to become a history painter.