Explore: Angelica Kauffman

(1741 - 1807)

Angelica Kauffman was a painter of portraits, genre, allegorical, classical, mythological and historical subjects. Born in Switzerland, she was educated in Florence and Rome, before settling in London in 1766. She became a founder and the first woman member of the Royal Academy, and worked on a wide range of artistic commissions in England until 1781, when she married the Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi. The couple retired first to Venice and then to Rome. Here, she continued to paint portraits, particularly of British sitters, and ran a Salon frequented by Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and others. Kauffman was a celebrated and successful artist by the time of her death in Rome, in November 1807.