Pioneering Artist Angelica Kauffman Put Women at Center Stage

In 1768, three dozen artists established the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Among their number were two women, but despite the progressive glow the pair’s inclusion may have lent the institution, they would be excluded from its governance. More than 150 years passed before another woman was admitted. Times change, however, and this month the academy will fete one of its female founders, Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807), with a one-woman show.

During her lifetime, the Swiss-born Kauffman became an accomplished portrait painter, but she remains best known for history and mythology painting. Here, she gravitated toward female subjects like Cleopatra and the sorceress Circe, changing the face of a genre long considered the highest—and most masculine—in Western art. “In this realm, where men were the heroes and women excluded from action,” writes historian Jenny Uglow, “Kauffman still managed to assert women’s power.”

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Amy Crawford is a Michigan-based freelance journalist writing about cities, science, the environment, art and education. A longtime Smithsonian contributor, her work also appears in CityLab and the Boston Globe.