Portrait of the Impromptu Virtuoso Teresa Bandettini-Landucci of Lucca

With this new acquisition, for the first time a work was purchased from this painter, who was already famous in her own lifetime, for the Düsseldorf Collection. Having grown up in Switzerland and Austria, and made her name and money in England and Italy, Kauffmann was one of the leading protagonists of Neoclassicism and one of the most influential figures in the Age of Sensibility and Enlightenment. Kauffmann’s salon in Rome was a stage to which towering intellects from all over Europe took part, including the famous poet and impromptu virtuoso Teresa Bandettini-Landucci (1763–1837). She is captured with her expansive gesture in the midst of reciting – almost like a ‘tableau vivant’ as it were. Kauffmann played a strong part in the development of this genre, which straddled posing portrait and history painting as ‘Ereignisbild’ involving a single figure. She paints her confidently declaiming friend the poetess (who was one of the few women to be admitted to the circle of ‘Arcadian’ poets, under the pen name of ‘Amarilli Etrusca’) in a dual role: as a poetess with a crown of ivy, and as the muse of poetry. (Bettina Baumgärtel)