The Sorrow of Telemachus

Angelica Kauffmann had just settled in Rome when she painted this in 1783, one of two pictures made for a local churchman, Monsignor Onorato Caetani. She moved in the circle around Winckelmann, the scholar whose writings were then teaching Europe to prize the calm restraint of ancient art, and you can feel that taste here. The scene comes from Fenelon's 'Adventures of Telemachus,' a French tale of Odysseus's son. Shipwrecked on Calypso's island, the boy grows sad when the nymphs sing of his lost father, and Calypso raises a hand to hush them. Kauffmann was already famous in London as a founding member of its Royal Academy, one of only two women among the founders.