Angelica Kauffmann

Extract

There is just at present an extraordinary revival of interest in the early Academicians. The publication, volume by volume, of the wonderful Farington Diary, the new annotated edition of J. T. Smith’s Life of Nollekens, and Dr. Williamson’s recent sumptuous quartos on Ozias Humphrey and Johann Zoffany, are all evidences of this. And that interest is quite as much literary as artistic; for no one can forget that in the first years of the Royal Academy, Dr. Johnson was its Professor of Ancient Literature, Goldsmith and Gibbon held successively the Chair of History, while James Boswell was Secretary for Foreign Correspondence.

Among the first Royal Academicians there were two women members, though strangely enough there have never been any since. One of these, Mary Moser, is to-day even more of a shadow than she was in her lifetime. But the other, Angelica Kauffmann, after long years of temporary eclipse, appears now to be coming into her own again, and to be fast regaining the popularity and esteem which were undoubtedly hers during the decades preceding the Revolution.