Kauffmann was both an influential salonnière and a wealthy self-made businesswoman. This ambition may have been the reason she spent her life from 1782 on in Italy, where she was, after Pompeo Batoni’s death, regarded as the best painter. She also gained preeminent prestige in history painting. Nearly everyone who was anyone in eighteenth-century Europe appears to have commissioned a portrait from her. There was also no lack of gossip, scandal, and caricature. In 1766, at age twenty-five, she moved with her father to London where she established a studio and was soon much hailed by London society, which one engraver pronounced was nothing less than “Angelicamad.” She was mentored by Joshua Reynolds and was one of the founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts. A child prodigy, she was cleverly introduced and marketed by her father to patrons of the nobility, to artists and to Grand tourists in Italy. (I will use this spelling for her name, although it varies in the books reviewed here.) She had an extraordinary international career and reputation. The Austro-Swiss painter Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807) was an eighteenth-century celebrity.
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