A Celebrity Artist’s Studio: Angelica Kauffman in Rome

Abstract

A Celebrity Artist’s Studio: Angelica Kauffman in Rome Wendy Wassyng Roworth (bio) In June 1766, Angelica Kauffman left Italy to pursue her painting career in England, where she became a Founding Member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a popular painter of portraits and history paintings. In London, she followed the English practice of maintaining a room for the display of finished paintings that was separate from her working studio, for while the public exhibitions in London at the Society of Artists and Royal Academy attracted large crowds, members of fashionable society also enjoyed visiting individual artists to view their recent work and to engage in informal social interactions and business transactions.1 Angelica Kauffman and her new husband, Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi, returned to Italy in 1781 and settled in Rome in November 1782. Her Italian biographer Giovanni Gherardo De Rossi noted that Kauffman established her Roman studio just a few years after the death of Anton Raphael Mengs and the publication of his art theory as a way to link her with the revered neoclassical painter and his influential ideas on painting.2 In fact, Kauffman and Zucchi moved into the house Mengs formerly occupied on the via Sistina in the popular artists’ quarter near the church of S. Trinità dei Monti above the Spanish Steps.3 As a well-established, successful artist by the time she returned to Italy, Kauffman’s celebrity status attracted Grand Tourists from all over Europe. [End Page 137] The Kauffman-Zucchi home, where she held a well attended salon, attracted foreign travelers from Britain, Russia, Poland, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere, who came to meet the celebrated artist and to commission portraits and subject pictures. She was constantly busy with multiple commissions throughout the 1780s and 1790s. Even during the French occupation of Rome in 1799 and its aftermath, when tourism was much reduced and work for artists limited, she managed to be productive. Several travel diaries and letters describe Kauffman’s well-appointed reception rooms decorated with some of her recent works, her small collection of Renaissance and seventeenth-century paintings, and replicas of antique statues and busts.4 Some prominent foreign visitors, as well as Kauffman’s friends and fellow artists, also spent time in her studio where client sittings for portraits took place. In contrast to her earlier experience in London, where it was customary and advantageous to maintain a show room to impress potential patrons, by the 1780s, as a celebrity at the height of her career, Kauffman no longer needed to attract commissions. On the contrary, clients on the Grand Tour came to her, and she had almost more work than she could handle. She produced numerous portraits of patrons and friends, history paintings, and compositions to be reproduced as engravings, and she continued to send pictures to London for the Royal Academy’s annual exhibitions until 1797. Many high-ranking travelers, whose comings and goings in Rome were recorded in the press, made visits to artists’ studios. In January, 1784, the Diario Ordinario di Roma reported that Emperor Joseph II of Austria visited the house of “Sig. Maria Kofeman, rinomata Pittrice” and the studios of Pompeo Batoni and Anton von Maron.5 It is interesting, and perhaps significant, that this notice refers to Kauffman’s house (casa) as distinct from Batoni’s and von Maron’s studios (studio), though whether that was a deliberate distinction based on gender or the location of the artists’ workspaces is not clear. Kauffman’s friend and biographer, Giovanni Gherardo De Rossi, noted that Joseph II was pleased to learn she was one of his German subjects and wished especially to see her highly praised portrait of members of his own family, King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Queen Carolina, the emperor’s sister, with their children (fig. 1).6 Kauffman described the emperor’s visit in a letter to one of her cousins in Schwarzenberg, Austria, her family’s native village. She expressed pride and admiration of the gracious and kind royal visitor, who spent more than an hour in her painting studio: Ich hate die unverhoffte Gnade Ihro Keyserliche Majestet in meinem hause zu sechen Ihro Majestet hielten...