Europe's most sought-after painter? Angelica Kauffman

She was a founding member of the Royal Academy in London, painted portraits of queens and high-ranking nobility and created revolutionary history paintings of female heroines: Angelica Kauffman, born in 1741 in Chur, Switzerland, enjoyed a unique career. Celebrated as a child prodigy, as an adult she became one of the most sought-after painters in Europe. Engravings based on her paintings decorated book covers, tobacco boxes and fans to an extent unknown at the time. Her studio in Rome, where she had lived since 1782, became the center of cultural life. Kauffman was keen to experiment and created sought-after portraits of aristocrats and famous people of her time. Kauffman did not portray the English actor David Garrick in one of his roles as usual, but as a private person. Above all, however, she is known for her history paintings, which, highly unusually at the time, often had female protagonists – or else chose rarely painted episodes such as that of Achilles disguised as a woman, who is unmasked by Odysseus. Female history painters were extremely rare as, apart from portraits, they were not allowed to work from live models. Most female painters therefore created landscapes and still lifes. Kauffman's groundbreaking paintings combined the sensibility of Rococo with the austerity of Classicism, which contemporaries could not see in any other painter. The Royal Academy in London is now dedicating the major exhibition Angelica Kauffman to her. Numerous paintings and accompanying preparatory drawings allow visitors to immerse themselves in the artist's working methods. The presentation runs from March 1 to June 30.

Kauffman was trained as a child by her father, the wealthy portrait and fresco painter Joseph Johann Kauffmann. Due to her father's commissions, the family lived in a number of Italian, Austrian and German cities. She became famous in her early 20s for a portrait of the archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann painted in 1764. Shortly afterwards, she moved to London, where she became famous for a portrait of the famous painter Joshua Reynolds and became rich in the following years. After her death in Rome in 1807, a bust of Kauffman was erected in the Pantheon.