A Sense of Place by Miranda Miller

 

                                             Angelica Kauffman self portrait at twelve

 

A few years ago, I had a Royal Literary Fund fellowship to help students at the Courtauld Institute, then in Somerset House, to write essays. While I was waiting for my Art History students to turn up,I sat in my attic office and wondered about the past of this great building. A hundred stairs down in the basement library, I found two wonderful books: James Fenton’s witty School for Genius and Angelica Goodden’s excellent Miss Angel, the Art and World of Angelica Kauffman. I’d seen a few of her paintings in Kenwood House in Hampstead but knew nothing about her extraordinary career.

 

                                                        Somerset House

 

 

I learnt that in the 18^th century a rotting Tudor palace on the Thames, in the Strand, was replaced by Sir William Chambers. His magnificent neo-classical building was a fitting setting for the ambitions of a group of artists, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, Angelica Kauffman and the botanical artist Mary Moser, who were all in love with the art of ancient Greece and Rome. They founded the Royal Academy of Arts in Somerset House in 1768 and with their new royal charter they hoped to give more dignity to the arts in England. The inclusion of the two women in this illustrious group was significant, although they weren’t allowed to attend life drawing classes, as you can see from this painting by Zoffany:

 The male artists stride confidently around gossiping together, gazing at the naked male model, while portraits of Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser stare wistfully down from the wall, like ancestors. It’s a terrible reflection on British misogyny in the arts that it wasn’t until 1928 that another woman artist, Dame Laura Knight, was fully accepted as an RA.

 

 My fascination with all this became my eighth novel, Angelica Paintress of Minds. She charmed me as she charmed the painters, musicians and also the royal family in eighteenth century London. A talented artist, musician and linguist, Angelica also had a gift for friendship. Her friends included Sir Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli, Queen Charlotte, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Emma Hamilton and Antonio Canova Throughout her life she painted honest self-portraits, as well as portraits of her friends, all of whom appear in my novel. When she was 27, she fell in love with and married the “Count de Horne”, a con man who was after her money. Thanks mainly to her friendship with Queen Charlotte she sailed through this potential scandal, which would have destroyed a less brilliant woman. As well as portraits, then the bread and butter of artists, she painted many allegorical, mythological and history paintings, often depicting melancholy women whose lives had been ruined by the macho exploits of their men.

Picture Ariadne abandoned by Theseus

 

 After fifteen years in London, when she was so successful that the word “Angelicamad” was coined, she moved to Rome with her second husband, Antonio Zucchi, a Venetian decorative artist who had come to England to work with the Adams brothers. Before she married him, she drew up what we’d now call a prenup, giving her total control over her own money. 

 

                                                        The Spanish Steps

 

 

Thanks to a generous grant from the Society of Authors I was able to go to Rome, where I‘d lived in my twenties. I was thrilled to revisit a city I love and which has changed remarkably little since Angelica built her beautiful house at the top of the Spanish steps. Sadly, it’s been demolished and replaced by a grand hotel where my partner and I enjoyed a very expensive cappuccino. I shut my eyes and reconstructed the floorplan I’d seen of her house. After that I felt even closer to her. She flourished in Rome, which was then the centre of the international art world. Grand Tourists and artists flocked to Rome and Angelica ran a salon that was a magnet for painters, writers and musicians from all over Europe.

 

On the same trip I also visited Weimar, where Goethe built himself a house with an imitation Italianate courtyard and staircase after the two years he spent in Italy studying art. He became a close friend of Angelica’s and I believe she was unrequitedly in love with him. He referred to her as a “tender soul” but didn’t like her portrait of him, which shows a sensitive side of his personality:

“It is always a handsome fellow, but there is no trace of me," he commented. Goethe much preferred to see himself as a "cultural hero," as in the more famous painting of him by Tischbein. Wandering around the grand house where he lived for fifty years I felt I understood him better.

 

 Napoleon’s army invaded Rome and the Pope was taken prisoner. Angelica feared that her  own paintings and her valuable art collection would be looted by French soldiers. Zucchi died, she became ill and many of her cosmopolitan friends fled. Angelica wrote in a letter to a friend, “those happy days are over;” yet she faced her difficult last years with the courage and determination she had shown all her life and continued to paint.  When she died in 1807 her friend, the sculptor Antonio Canova,organised a majestic funeral.

 

 While you’re writing a novel time is quite fluid in your head: the eighteenth century, the 1970s and this morning are all happening at once. For me, this imaginative conjuring trick was made easier by the magnificent architecture of Somerset House and the Spanish Steps, and by the Italian influence visible in Goethe’s house in Weimar. In the past I was sceptical about the idea that physically visiting places helps you to write but now I’m convinced. 

 

Angelica Paintress of Minds, will be published in the US by Barbican Press this month.