Sarah Pickstone on the legacy of Angelica Kauffman RA

Artist and RA Schools alumna Sarah Pickstone has created a valentine to Angelica Kauffman, one of the most important painters of the 18th century and one of the RA’s founders.

And the other three are in the ceiling of the RA's entrance foyer – but you can look at them here without getting neck-ache...

Let's hear more from Pickstone on her time researching this extraordinary woman.

“Angelica Kauffman was a force of nature: a hugely successful artist in her day and much celebrated in Britain, her home for 15 years.”

"I really tried to get a sense of her being in the world as a woman artist and as a continental European artist at that time. Born in Chur in Switzerland, she came to London in 1766 full of expertise from her experience and education studying classical sculpture and Renaissance painting throughout Italy. Her father was a clerical painter and she travelled with him from an early age after the death of her mother. Her reputation as an artist was quickly recognised in Italy and she was held in great esteem as a young painter, until her death, in Rome in 1807."

“And then she arrives in London. She became good friends with the artist Joshua Reynolds RA, whose lectures and publications on the Discourses of Art are the foundation of this series by Kauffman. The four roundels that make up Elements of Art are about those ideas of what makes good art: invention, composition, drawing, and colour. I like to imagine Kauffman contributed to shaping Reynolds's discourses, because of her experience and classical education in Italy. She would have been part of the studio conversation, the banter, part of the discourse.”

"I read a lot about Kauffman over the course of the project and visited her father’s home in Schwarzenberg, Austria. I had a strong sense of her."

"I started with drawing. I was looking at the paintings in the RA’s store while they were down from the ceiling. Up-close you can see the screw-holes at the edges, the white highlights in the eyes, the flesh-tones, and mistakes that have been painted over."

"When I started drawing from the paintings, I realised they were full of colour; I couldn’t get the HB pencil out so I borrowed my daughter’s crayons. Kauffman structures things very much from a colourist’s point of view."

“Her paintings feel really fluid, so I took the drawings back to the studio and translated them with watercolours.”

"Then I started this huge painting and I had visions of it being much more abstract but it just wouldn’t work. I had a strong sense it needed to be more like Kauffman’s painting as though she was saying 'Come on - whose painting is this after all?' So it’s ended up being much more figurative than anything I’d usually do: there are flesh tones, everything’s in proportion. We were in debate with each other, and I lost."

"The project felt very real, very urgent - it really helped to have Kauffman at my shoulder saying let’s do this!"

“It’s really important the space that women take up; the space that any artist takes up. It doesn’t matter if it’s tiny. There’s nothing inherently good about big spaces or taking up a lot of room. It’s something I talk to students about a lot: make a decision about the space you take up in your work.”

“Everyone can learn to draw, it is the most democratic of media – no costs and no rules. The attention any one of us gives to making and seeing helps generate ideas that feed back into politics, economics, the sciences and arts. For me, Kauffman’s Elements of Art offer a strong image of this artistic identity, in praise of those who make art everywhere.”

“Kauffman disseminated her work very successfully through prints; she was a great entrepreneur."

"She is probably best known for her portraits of royalty, aristocracy and prestigious commissions...

...as well as major paintings from history and mythology...

...but she also made furniture decorations...

...ceiling decorations...

...and sculptures to decorate houses – among other things."

"She was such a flexible artist, perhaps in part due to financial necessity. Subsequent generations of male critics judged her harshly and dismissed her work as a purely decorative. I think much was lost of her practice and reputation."