Young woman reading

Maria Anna Angelika Kauffmann (1741-1807), usually known in English as Angelica Kauffman, was a Swiss Neoclassical painter who had a hugely successful career in London and Rome. Remembered primarily as a history painter, Kauffmann was also a skilled portraitist, landscape and decoration painter. She was one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy in London in 1768. In 1781, after her first husband's death, she married Antonio Zucchi (1728–1795), a Venetian artist then resident in England. Shortly thereafter she retired to Rome, where she befriended, among others, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who said she worked harder and accomplished more than any artist he knew. Always restive, she wanted to do more and lived for another 25 years, retaining much of her earlier prestige.

Long patronised in art history as merely a 'dainty' woman artist, her work has been thoroughly reappraised in recent years, and today her Neoclassicism, which combines purity of outline, careful colour and often deliberate qualities of delicacy, charm and decorative effectiveness, can be regarded as a major complement to the traditionally dominant, more austere and 'macho' Neoclassicism of her near contemporary, Jacques-Louis David.

As well as being a major painter, Kauffmann was an etcher of distinction, and many of her most famous paintings were made accessible and affordable as prints. Synonymous with Kauffmann are her stipple engravings, a technique used to create tone by distributing a pattern of dots of various sizes and densities across the image.