Angelica Kauffmann

When the Royal Academy of Arts was founded in London in 1768, two of the 36 founding members were women. One was Angelica Kauffmann, a Swiss-born painter already famous across Europe for her history pictures and portraits.

Being a founder did not mean being treated as an equal. When Johan Zoffany painted the assembled academicians a few years later, he set them around a nude male model in the life-drawing room. Kauffmann and the other woman, the flower painter Mary Moser, could not respectably be shown in that room, so Zoffany put them in as two portraits hanging on the wall. Barred from drawing the nude, Kauffmann built her reputation on scenes from history and myth peopled largely by women.

She had trained in Italy, spoke several languages, and moved easily among the powerful. In Rome she became a friend of the writer Goethe, who sat for her and prized her company. After her London years she settled again in Rome, where her studio was a fixture for visiting artists and travellers. She and Moser remained the only women in the Academy until 1936, when the painter Laura Knight was elected.