Angelica Kaufmann’s self-portrait hangs in the house at Nostell Priory and it is possible that she had a hand in the decorations, working alongside Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale. The self-portrait sees her torn between her twins passions – for music and for painting, who she paints as muse-like figures.
Swiss-born Angelica (1741–1807) worked in England for fifteen years and in 1768 became a founder member of the Royal Academy. It would be another 150 years until the next female artist was elected as an academician.
If we can believe the portraits of her, Angelica looked impossibly glamorous, in a Dangerous Liaisons kind of way when she painted but I can’t believe that she dressed like that when she painted murals at Nostell, so I’ve borrowed Kate Winslet’s landscape gardener’s outfit from A Little Chaos.