Angelica Kauffman: An Artist’s Legacy in Porcelain
March is Women’s History Month. Previously, we have explored extraordinary women designers and artists who produced some of the remarkable teawares in in the Chitra Collection. Last year, we reviewed female patrons: women who owned and cared for our objects, often funding significant developments in the decorative arts.
Recent research on our Viennese porcelain tea set of ca. 1880 revealed another important female creative presence. Each tea cup, teapot and sugar bowl display a fine miniature painting after a design by Swiss female painter Angelica Kauffman. Only the tray presents a different iconographic source.
Who was Angelica Kauffman?
Angelica Kauffman (30 October 1741 – 5 November 1807) was a Swiss artist associated with the Neoclassical movement. She was renowned across Europe for her accomplishments in London and Rome. While best known for her history paintings, she also excelled in portraiture and landscape painting. In 1768, she became one of the two female painters, alongside Mary Moser, to be a founding member of the Royal Academy in London.
Why was Angelica Kauffman so important?
Angelica Kauffman’s works were highly valued in her lifetime by fellow artists and critics alike. She was celebrated for her paintings with a mythological, historical or literary subject. This was fairly unusual for European women artists in the 18th century, as they were prohibited from studying the male nude – a necessity for depicting anatomically correct male heroes in narrative painting. Kauffman avoided this problem by crafting compositions that placed female characters in starring roles.
Her works reached a broad audience through a plethora of engravings produced after her paintings. These prints found their way into ceramic workshops around Europe influencing designs in Meissen in Germany, Derby in England and our focus today: Vienna in Austria.
As one engraver remarked: ‘The whole world is Angelicamad’!
The Viennese tea set in the Chitra Collection boasts delicately painted mythological scenes after Angelica Kauffman’s designs. Here, we reveal the artistic inspiration behind each ornate object.
Angelica Kauffman’s Self Portrait: The Artist as Muse
One teacup depicts two women seated together. This intimate scene is directly inspired by Angelica Kauffman’s The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry of 1782. Kauffman portrays herself in the role of ‘Design’, an elegant woman in a diaphanous white dress, clutching a drawing board and a porte-crayon. She looks thoughtfully at us, while her companion, a woman in red and gold, places one hand on Kauffman’s shoulder, the other holding a small lyre. She whispers (or sings) into the ear of ‘Design’, guiding Kauffman’s drawing, sparking an idea.
The wings protruding from the head of ‘Poetry’ symbolise her creative mind; the same motif can be found in Kauffman’s painting of the concept ‘Invention’ in the Royal Academy of Art. The craftsman of the teacup altered the colour palette, presumably because he or she had only seen the design in print.
As portrayed in the painting, Angelica Kauffman was greatly inspired by ancient and contemporary poetry and literature, and would often have verses read aloud to her while she worked. The rest of the set continues to reveal her literary knowledge and appreciation of the written word.
Evidence of Kauffman’s Lost Works in Ceramics
Despite receiving critical acclaim in her life-time, European art historical literature overlooked Kauffman’s achievements in favour of her male contemporaries, until relatively recently. Perhaps due to this oversight, several of her works are thought to be lost.
We know of their existence, however, through the prints produced after them. Many were made by her Royal Academy colleague: Italian engraver Francesco Bartolozzi. Due to this diligent work, her compositions became known to craftsmen internationally.
‘Artistic Invention’: A continued theme
The second teacup portrays one of Kauffman’s ‘lost works’: The Birth of William Shakespeare. The infant Shakespeare is shown being supported by a female mythological figure, resting against a boulder in a classicising, idyllic landscape. Following his upward gaze, he raises his hands towards the woman, whose winged head suggests her as emblematic of divine inspiration, or fame. Kauffman’s composition appears to capture the moment when the child became destined to be the greatest English poet and playwright. This theme is similar to the previous teacup, which meditated upon Angelica Kauffman’s own artistic ‘invention’. By choosing these designs for the two teacups, was the Viennese designer suggesting an affinity between two great creative minds: Kauffman and Shakespeare?
Alternatively, these compositions allude to the ancient debate regarding the virtues of painting verses poetry, dating from the Roman poet Horace’s famous phrase ‘Ut pictura poesis’ or ‘as is painting so is poetry’. Horace, in fact appears on the milk jug.
Inspired by another lost painting, it depicts the legend ‘Horace and the miracle of the doves’. White doves encircle the sleeping child, symbolising the moment when the young boy was chosen by the gods to be a great poet. The three compositions portray the genesis of creative talent, while suggesting the relationship between the ‘sister-arts’ of painting and poetry.
This was a debate close to Kauffman’s heart. A talented opera singer from an early age, she was forced to choose between following a career in music or painting. She would reflect on this decision later in life in a painting entitled Self Portrait of the Artist Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting, 1794. Here, she raises her biography to that of a classical epic, basing the composition on the story of the Roman hero Hercules’ choice between the paths of Vice and Virtue.
Angelica Kauffman and Neoclassicism
In the mid-18th century, a new cultural movement was sweeping across Europe. Referred to as ‘Neoclassicism’, it sought to revive the art and values of classical antiquity in Greece and Rome, emerging partly thanks to the first excavations in the archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum. In the 1760s, Angelica Kauffman was travelling in Italy as an assistant to her father, a painter. Here she encountered newly discovered antique objects, and the contemporary artists who sought to incorporate ‘classical’ styles into their own work.
Cupid and the Graces
On the sugar bowl and the teapot, we see Cupid or Eros, the Roman or Greek god of love engaging with members of the three ‘Graces’, or ‘Charities’: goddesses in Greek mythology.
On the bowl, Cupid finds Aglaia, the goddess of beauty and health, asleep. He proceeds to tie her to a laurel with a chain of woven roses. Not only is the story classical in tone, but for the form of the goddess, Kauffman was inspired by a famous ancient sculpture: The Sleeping Ariadne, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic sculpture dating from 2nd century BC, held in the Vatican.
While the previous scene showed Cupid playing a trick on the goddess, on this teapot, Euphrosine, the goddess of good cheer and joy steals Cupid’s bow and arrow, holding them out of his reach. A smirk gently plays upon her lips.
These two playful images illustrated a piece of contemporary poetry by Italian librettist Pietro Metastasio’s Le Grazie Vendicate or ‘The Graces Avenged’ – a libretto about conflicts between the Graces, Cupid and Venus. It was first set to music in 1735 in Vienna by Italian composer Antonio Caldara.
Odd One Out: The tray’s alternative source
Only one element of this set has no connection to Kauffman – the tea tray. Based on a print after a painting and tapestry design by French rococo painter Jean-François de Troy (1737), it depicts the Jewish heroine Esther fainting in fear before her husband King Ahasuerus of Persia. This scene from the Old Testament derives from the Greek addition to the Book of Esther, in contrast to Kauffman’s compositions which reference Greco-Roman classical mythology. Also unlike the rest of the set, the tray presents a woman with less agency and power – a ‘damsel in distress’. Its visual and thematic dissonance among the other objects suggest it being produced by another hand, or at a later date.
The Legacy of Angelica Kauffman
Angelica Kauffman is best known today for her contributions to the tradition of Western oil painting. This Viennese tea set, however, demonstrates her influence reaching far beyond this medium. Through the engravings made after her paintings, her works could be found in palaces and grand institutions like the Royal Academy, as well as in the domestic space. Her compositions appeared throughout homes in Europe: in the form of a print hung on the wall, or, as in this case, to be discovered on a treasured teacup or teapot.
Text by Evelyn Earl
Research Assisted by Nancy Edwards
