Where to See Angelica Kauffmann: Self-Portraits, Telemachus and a Royal Family

A founder could still be kept outside. Angelica Kauffmann helped establish London's Royal Academy in 1768, but women were excluded from its classes with nude models. In a group portrait of the academicians, she and Mary Moser appeared as pictures on the wall rather than people in the room. Kauffmann's own paintings suggest a different distribution of authority. She gave scholars their public faces, arranged royal families and decided how her own image should enter a gallery of predecessors.

Zurich: the scholar and the woman who painted him

A pen pauses above an open book in Portrait of Winckelmann, belonging to the Kunsthaus Zürich. The book rests on an ancient relief showing the Three Graces. Kauffmann painted the portrait in 1764, the year Winckelmann published his history of ancient art. A Swiss friend commissioned it, and its circulation in prints helped spread the young painter's reputation. Antiquity appears here as something under discussion, within reach of a hand, rather than a collection of remote marble bodies.

Kauffmann's education had itself involved travel and copying. Her father trained her, and she worked as his assistant through Switzerland, Austria and Italy. Moving from place to place offered access to paintings and people that a more settled life might have denied her. The portrait makes a useful first encounter because it connects the two kinds of work on which she built her career. A recognisable individual sits in front of us, surrounded by the classical learning that also fed her narrative paintings.

New York: a shipwreck retold in a drawing room

Telemachus arrives on Calypso's island through a French book. Telemachus and the Nymphs of Calypso and The Sorrow of Telemachus draw on Fénelon's novel of 1699, not directly on a passage from Homer. Kauffmann painted the companions in Rome for Monsignor Onorato Caetani. The ancient hero's son had become a subject for an eighteenth-century reader, and then for the reader's walls. Their dates in our records are 1782 and 1783; the Met placed them together in Gallery 627 at our autumn 2026 check.

Treat the pair as a conversation rather than two illustrations to tick off. Moving your attention from one to the other makes the titles do useful work: an encounter in one, sorrow in the other. You need not have read the novel to ask who is listening and who commands the scene. The shared commission also matters. These pictures were meant to sustain company with each other, so a visit that gives time to only the more immediately appealing one misses part of their original arrangement.

Florence: replacing an earlier self

Kauffmann did not want her youthful image to speak for her forever. The Uffizi already owned her Self-Portrait in Bregenz Forest Costume when she offered a new Self-Portrait, painted in 1787. She felt the earlier picture no longer represented her abilities or position. The replacement arrived in July 1788; a gold medal followed in thanks, and it was placed beside Michelangelo. An artist who had once copied older paintings could now negotiate her own place among their makers.

Naples: a dynasty at ease

A child strokes a dog in Ferdinand IV and His Family, owned by Capodimonte. Kauffmann arranged the family along a broad horizontal space, using the familiarity of an English group portrait for a royal household. Preliminary studies were made from life. The canvas is more than four metres wide, so its informality required considerable staging. Let the small action with the dog interrupt the official reading. It brings a family's momentary attention into a picture built to preserve a dynasty's appearance.

The Louvre collection: a child with the wrong name

The child beside Baroness Krüdener was sometimes identified as her daughter Juliette. But Juliette had not yet been born when Kauffmann painted the portrait in Rome in 1786: this is her son Paul. He later owned the painting, and it passed to his own son before Napoleon III bought and donated it in 1860. A correction to a name therefore restores a family history as well as an identity. The small sitter became one of the people responsible for preserving the canvas.

Begin with the Met pair if you want a recorded opportunity to compare related paintings in one room. Choose Florence for the question of how a painter presents herself, checking the availability of each self-portrait before arranging the visit. For the Louvre portrait, establish where the work can be seen before making Paris part of the plan. Above all, allow the portraits time: Kauffmann's sitters often tell you as much about her ambitions as the heroes she painted.