Angelica Kauffman

Born in Chur in 1741^[4] to an itinerant Swiss painter, Kauffman had grown up painting commissions across Austria and Italy, speaking four languages fluently by the time she moved to London in 1766^[4]. Two years later she became one of only two female founding members of the Royal Academy, alongside the flower painter Mary Moser, a distinction not repeated for nearly two centuries. She sent history paintings to the first Royal Academy exhibition in 1769: Hector Taking Leave of Andromache and, the following year, Vortigern and Rowena, both now at Saltram House in Devon.

Her most celebrated work is Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi (c.1785^[4], Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), in which Cornelia presents her two young sons to a visiting woman as her jewels in place of material ornament. Scholars describe it as a paradigmatic Enlightenment exemplum virtutis, composed with the severity and low-relief clarity characteristic of Neoclassicism^[4]. Unusually for the period, Kauffman placed women consistently at the centre of historical action rather than at its weeping margins.

After marrying the Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi in 1781^[4], she returned to Rome, where her studio became a fashionable Grand Tour destination. Goethe noted her work ethic with admiration; courts in Russia, Poland, Naples, and Austria collected her work. She died in Rome in 1807^[4].