This characteristic drawing was made by Angelica Kauffman shortly after her relocation to Italy from London to become a historical painter. Drawn in black and white chalk on prepared paper, the scene shows Cleopatra Alcyone the wife of Meleager beseeching her husband to fight and save Calydon from destruction. This iconographically inventive scene, Kauffman foregrounds the role of Cleopatra in persuading her husband to enjoin battle and save the city. It seems likely that Kauffman’s source was Homer, who has Achilles’ tutor, Phoenix recount the tale to persuade him to return to the battle against the Trojans. Kauffman’s frieze-like composition shows Meleager seated on a stool, his wife kneeling at his feet pointing at a pile of his discarded armour. As with many of Kauffman’s most original designs, the female protagonist occupies a crucial and active role in the emerging narrative. The design was developed into a stipple engraving published by her long-time collaborator Francesco Bartolozzi in 1783.
Kauffman had been born in Chur, Switzerland, the only child of the Austrian painter Johann Joseph Kauffman. In 1742 Kauffman’s father moved his family to Italy where, her early biographers record that she rapidly distinguished herself as a prodigy of both music and art.[1] Kauffman decided to pursue a career as a painter and undertook a formal Grand Tour of Italy in 1759 before settling in Rome in 1763. There she was introduced into a circle of British neo-classical painters including Gavin Hamilton, Nathaniel Dance and Benjamin West. Encouraged by her contacts with Anglo-Saxon painters, Kauffman travelled to London in 1766 where she met and was befriended by Joshua Reynolds who became instrumental in promoting her career. In London she established a profitable and celebrated portrait practice working for a fashionable clientele.
In 1782 Kauffman retuned to Rome after marrying the Italian decorative painter Antonio Zucchi, who yielded his own career to manage his spouse’s finances. Economics partly motivated their move, Meng’s recent death and Batoni’s slowing career were to position Kauffman as Rome’s dominant portraitist, decisively secured by the 1783 commission to paint the Neapolitan royal family. Moreover, the explosion of the Grand Tour among the nobility of northern and eastern Europe opened vast new markets for the multilingual painter. Kauffman and Zucchi occupied grand quarters on via Sistina, formerly the studio of Mengs, at the top of the Spanish Steps. Kauffman therefore cast herself as the prime heir to the classicising tradition of Roman painting.
Kauffman’s move to Italy saw her become an ever more inventive iconographer, drawing on a range of antique and modern sources. The current design is indebted to Kauffman’s close reading of Homer. As a friend of the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton, Kauffman would have been aware of the popularity of his cycle of paintings drawn from the Iliad. Kauffman was always sensitive to the role of women in heroic narratives and undoubtedly found Homer’s use of the example of Cleopatra to persuade Achilles to rejoin the fight compelling. No painting of the composition survives, but a stipple engraving made by Francesco Bartolozzi was published with the title ‘Cleopatra persuading Meleagar to take his arms in defence of his country.’ Kauffman has used her preferred medium for composing, black chalk on a prepared paper. Kauffman used this prepared surface because it gave texture and bite for the chalk allowing for her to plot and arrange complex, multi-figural compositions with ease. As with many of Kauffman’s drawings on prepared paper the surface shows signs of wear, but the energetic mark making is still legible and gives a sense of how fluent she was as a designer. Multiple pentiments give insight into Kauffman’s working method, for example the positioning of the hands of the standing attendant behind Cleopatra. This sheet which may have been the template for Bartolozzi’s etching is a rare compositional study by Kauffman and points to her mastery of design, expression and gesture, the unusual subject-matter also underscores her ambition as a historical painter.
Francesco Bartolozzi, after Kauffman
Cleopatra and Meleager
Stipple etching
12 x 15 ¼ inches; 315 x 392 mm
1783
© The Trustees of the British Museum