Studio RT Ltd

Description

We are offering this large and attractive watercolour from the late 18th Century in the manner of Angelika Kauffman. The painting depicts a woman clasping her three children around her. She is holding a toddler in one arm, who is partially supported by a sling around her neck of a length of blue fabric, while her other arm is around an older girl with her hair up, wearing a long skirt and blouse. The other child, a boy is hanging on to his mothers arm. She is dressed in a simple version of the dresses of the late 18th Century and has her hair in a knot on the top of her head with blue ribbon.

Maria Anna Angelika Kauffmann RA 30 October 1741 – 5 November 1807), usually known in English as Angelica Kauffman, was a Swiss Neoclassical painter who had a successful career in London and Rome. Remembered primarily as a history painter, Kauffmann was a skilled portraitist, landscape and decoration painter. She was, along with Mary Moser, one of two female painters among the founding members of the Royal Academy in London in 1768

While in Venice, Kauffman was persuaded by Lady Wentworth, the wife of the British ambassador, to accompany her to London. One of the first pieces she completed in London was a portrait of David Garrick, exhibited in the year of her arrival at "Mr Moreing's great room in Maiden Lane." The rank of Lady Wentworth opened society to her, and she was everywhere well received, the royal family especially showing her great favour. Her firmest friend, however, was Sir Joshua Reynolds. In his pocketbook her name as "Miss Angelica" or "Miss Angel" appears frequently and in 1766 he painted her, a compliment which she returned by her Portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Another instance of her intimacy with Reynolds is to be found in her variation of Guercino's Et in Arcadia Ego, a subject which Reynolds repeated a few years later in his portrait of Mrs Bouverie and Mrs Crewe.

From 1769 until 1782 Kauffman was an annual exhibitor with the Royal Academy, sending sometimes as many as seven pictures, generally on classical or allegoric subjects. One of the most notable was Leonardo expiring in the Arms of Francis the First (1778).
In 1773, she was appointed by the Academy with others to decorate St Paul's Cathedral, a scheme that was never carried out, and it was she who, with Biagio Rebecca, painted the ceiling of the Academy's old lecture room at Somerset House.

In 1781, after her first husband's death (she had long been separated from him), she married Antonio Zucchi (1728–1795), a Venetian artist then resident in England.[20] Shortly afterwards she retired to Rome, where she befriended, among others, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe yet, always restive, she wanted to do more and lived for another 25 years with much of her old prestige intact.[20] In 1782, Kauffman's father died, as did her husband in 1795. In 1794, she painted, Self-Portrait Hesitating Between Painting and Music, in which she emphasises the difficult choice she had faced in choosing painting as her sole career, in dedication to her mother's death.

She continued at intervals to contribute to the Royal Academy in London, her last exhibit being in 1797. After this she produced little, and in 1807 she died in Rome, being honoured by a splendid funeral under the direction of Canova. The entire Academy of St Luke, with numerous ecclesiastics and virtuosi, followed her to her tomb in Sant'Andrea delle Fratte, and, as at the burial of Raphael, two of her best pictures were carried in procession

The watercolour has been newly double mounted in two-tone acid-free mount card and has been newly framed in a new 1 1/8 inch bronze/gold coloured frame to suit. It will be supplied with new brass hangers, new brass picture wire and will be ready to hang.

Image size: 17 x 11 1/2 inches - 43.15cm x 29.2cm

Frame size 25 3/8 x 19 5/8 inches - 64.45cm x 49.85cm:

Medium: Watercolours on paper laid to card

Condition: Very good. There is no foxing or damage and the mounts and frame are new.