Women Painting Shakespeare: Angelica Kauffman’s Text-images
University of Bologna
Histories of the paintings, engravings, and illustrations of Shakespeare’s plays have been almost exclusively devoted to male artists,1 despite the considerable number of women painters who have portrayed Shakespearian subjects over the centuries.2 This is partly due to the fact that female artists received scarce critical (as opposed to popular) attention in their own time. Probably the most significant woman painter of Shakespeare – and the only one to attract considerable critical discussion in her own day – is the Swiss-German artist Angelica Kauffman (1741–1897). Kauffman enjoyed enormous popularity and prestige in Georgian England, where she lived and worked from 1766 to 1781, and where she was effectively elected to the ranks of British artists, as Richard Samuel’s celebrated group portrait The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (1778) suggests, placing her emblematically in the company of the eight leading Blue Stockings of the day, including such writers as Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, and Elizabeth Griffith, all of whom were known, among other things, for their essays on Shakespeare.3 Samuel thus elevates Kauffman to the order not only of British women artists and intellectuals but, more specifically, of British women Shakespearians. Particularly pertinent in the context of the group portrait is Kauffman’s vicinity to Montagu, whose 1769 Essay in defence of Shakespeare against Voltaire, a key text in the canonization of the Bard much appreciated by David Garrick, devotes a chapter to historical drama in which the author compares the naturalness of Shakespeare’s historical personages and events to the ‘Sister art’ of Renaissance painting, which in turn inspired Kauffman’s own Shakespearian work.4
Kauffman’s popularity in England endured long after her departure for Italy in 1781. From Rome she produced history paintings, including Shakespearian subjects, for British engravers and printers. It is difficult to determine the exact extent of her Shakespearian repertory, partly because history painting – the genre of which she had been, together with Benjamin West, the most prominent exponent in England – is a narrative pictorial mode that comprehends subjects from historiographical, mythical, biblical, and literary sources, sometimes blurring the differences between them.5 Kauffman drew frequently on classical history, and in some cases these coincide with characters and episodes dramatized in Shakespeare’s Roman plays, without necessarily deriving from them. For example, her early 1764 painting Coriolanus entreated by Vetturia and Volumnia, commissioned by John Byng, is taken directly from Plutarch rather than from Shakespeare (Coriolanus 5.3), although presumably British interest in the subject was in part due to the play; her later print of Coriolanus and Volumnia (1785), instead, is certainly based on Shakespeare’s Roman play. Another case in point is the series of oils on canvas dedicated to Cleopatra – who, together with Penelope, is the most recurrent and paradigmatic female figure in Kauffman’s repertoire – which were frequently reproduced in print and even in furniture. These include Cleopatra decorating the tomb of Mark Antony, painted in England (1770), and The death of Marc Antony (1783) and Cleopatra throwing herself at the feet of Augustus after the death of Marc Antony (1783), both painted in Rome. The English painting – a pictorial paraphrase of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego6 that also recalls Kauffman’s own earlier Fame decorating Shakespeare’s tomb (c. 1770), showing an allegorical lady sprinkling flowers on the Bard’s memorial – has no direct counterpart in Antony and Cleopatra. The later Italian works, meanwhile, have been described by Kauffman scholars as ‘two episodes from Shakespeare’,7 but in reality the scene of Cleopatra with Augustus is conspicuously and strategically omitted in Shakespeare’s play.
Whatever the direct Shakespearian affinities or otherwise of the Cleopatra paintings, however, they share a central characteristic with the artist’s more certain works from Shakespeare, namely female historical and personal agency, often disguised as submissiveness: as Sarah Hyde notes, Cleopatra appears to be passive, but Kauffman relied, for the pathos of the painted scenes, on her audience’s knowledge that the Egyptian queen went on to take her own life rather than submit to Octavius.8 The paintings privilege, in particular, female agency through posture and gesture, the most significant of which is that of imploration, a kinesic act that denotes subordination but in reality expresses a mode of power: ‘Cleopatra’ – reads the artist’s description of her throwing herself painting – ‘humble and prostrate at the feet of Augustus, imploring mercy’.9
Kauffman’s more certain Shakespearian paintings likewise have primarily female protagonists. While her predecessors and contemporaries, from Hogarth on, privilege male characters (Macbeth, Lear, Falstaff, Orlando) seen in vigorous action, or male actors (notably Garrick) performing celebrated stage roles, Kauffman’s heroines frequently appear engaged in more intimate and ‘private’ acts, and not via specific stage performances. What characterizes much of this work is again a particular attention to gesture, especially the position and movement of the hands. To some extent this reflects contemporary acting style, with its emphasis on gesture in the representation of the passions, but it also constitutes a precise pictorial and corporeal code in Kauffman’s oeuvre. A good example of the use of such ‘manual’ signifiers is the 1782 painting for the carver and gilder James Birchall, which is described by Kauffman as ‘[an oval painting] that represents Cordelia invoking the help of Jove for her father King Lear who is in imminent danger of being betrayed – subject taken from Sakspire [sic].’10 The description alludes to the apostrophe at 4.7.14–15:
O you kind gods,
Cure this great breach in his abused nature!
Kauffman shows the child-like Cordelia in a gesture of imploration, her left hand reaching up to the sky against the background of a picturesque landscape. Her supplication indicates a position of vulnerability, but at the same time suggests the determined and tragic agency of Cordelia in the last two acts of the play. Such direct ‘quotation’ of a precise moment in the text of the play, and especially its engagement with the gestural as well as discursive texture of the scene, distinguishes this and other Kauffman Shakespearian paintings from those of her male colleagues, as does an accentuated pathos in the representation of the female protagonist-victim. These works become what W. J. T. Mitchell in his seminal volume Picture Theory terms image-texts,11 or what we might more properly term text-images, namely images whose reception and interpretation depends on an intimate dialectic with the texts in question, rather than a generic relationship with a given play or character, translating the speech-act dynamic of the drama into a mode of visual and especially corporeal performativity.
A further female gesture of imploration appears in the oil on canvas representing The Tempest, 3.1 (1782, for Birchall),12 marked again by attention to the language and semiotics of the text, and in particular to the interplay of hands among the three characters present: Ferdinand is at his manual labour on the logs, as Miranda, placing her left hand on his right ‘working’ arm, makes a pleading gesture with her own right hand, while Prospero looks on from a cavernous space in the background (‘a grotto in an uninhabited island’),13 his right hand grasping a pen and his left a book of magic. Miranda’s open mouth, meanwhile, suggests that she is speaking, and indeed her speech is readily identifiable:
Alas, now, pray you,
Work not so hard
[…] pray now, rest yourself;
He’s safe for these three hours.
(3.1.15–21)
It is thus a speaking and gesticulating picture, halfway between a pictorial reading of Shakespeare’s text in a precise dialogical moment, and the representation of an idealized stage production involving a careful gestural choreography against a colourful painted backcloth: the setting is a picturesque land- and seascape in the style of Salvator Rosa, whose flatness, however, betrays a certain staginess.14 This is a further distinctive feature of Kauffman’s Shakespeare paintings: they often erase the boundaries between the naturalistic and the theatrical. Stuart Sillars notes what he terms ‘the move out of the theatre [through] the use of landscape’ in late eighteenth-century Shakespeare paintings;15 Kauffman modifies this move by bringing landscape back, as it were, into the theatrical arena.
The scene in Kauffman’s representation of Othello 5.2 (for Joseph Collyer, printed 1783) is a dark and circumscribed domestic space that again could well be a stage set, especially given the presence of a raised bed (or perhaps stage) curtain and the bedroom (or possibly stage) door in the background. Here is an extreme version of female agency in passive mode, figuring the sleeping Desdemona about to be murdered by Othello (the print identifies the discursive moment: the Moor’s ‘Yet I’ll not shed her blood’, 5.2.3).16 Again the dramatic dynamics are entrusted to the interplay of hands: a distinctly oriental and turbaned Othello bears an exotic candle-holder in his left hand to illuminate his victim, while his right hand rests on the dagger he is simultaneously declaring he will not use. Desdemona’s left hand, meanwhile, props up her sleeping head on the bed, while her right clasps a sheet in childlike fashion.
In 1787, by way of recognition of her double status as ‘British’ artist and painter of Shakespeare, Kauffman received two commissions from John Boydell – who had already printed several of her paintings – for his celebrated if doomed Shakespeare Gallery. Kauffman, the only woman painter included in the Gallery,17 chose to illustrate episodes respectively from Troilus and Cressida 5.2 and The Two Gentlemen of Verona 5.4, both of which are choral scenes dramatizing the theme of infidelity. The paintings were displayed in Boydell’s Gallery in Pall Mall, and then engraved for his illustrated edition of the plays.
The Troilus painting (Figure 2) presents what Kauffman describes as ‘a night scene, by torchlight’,18 that again could well be theatrical (or operatic: Kauffman shows us a polyphonic quartet analogous, for example, to Mozart’s ‘Non ti fidar, oh misera’ (Don Giovanni, 1787)). It pictures Diomedes’s seduction of Cressida (and vice versa) before the eavesdropping and suffering Troilus, who is restrained from intervening by Ulysses. Frederick Burwick identifies Cressida’s posture in the picture as one of imploration: ‘Cressida plea[d]s with Diomed to release her from her oath’,19 (see line 28: ‘I prithee, do not hold me to mine oath’). The inscription to the print, however, indicates a later moment in the scene, in which Cressida, having so far offered token resistance to Diomedes’s advances, proffers a blatantly seductive gesture towards her suitor, made explicit by Troilus (this is the line he is shown uttering in the painting):
FIGURE 2 Calchas’ Tent. Diomed and Cressida, Troilus, Ulysses, and Thersites (1788/89), engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti
Troilus: She strokes his cheek! (52)
It is true, however, that Kauffman renders the gesture ambiguous by figuring Cressida’s body and face in an attitude of tension, as if divided between resistance and surrender, thereby creating a spatial synthesis between the earlier imploration and the later caress. Such ambiguity has considerable implications for the reading of the scene, since it partially redeems Cressida from the stereotyped icon – present in other illustrations for Boydell by Thomas Kirk20 – as the proverbial embodiment of female treachery (a stereotype endorsed by Troilus himself: ‘Let all untruths stand by thy stained name’, 178). This redemptive reading accords with Elizabeth Griffith’s benevolent view of Cressida in The Morality of Shakespeare.21 Cressida’s new-found moral dignity, moreover, is accentuated by the ‘grand style’ adopted by Kauffman, which implicitly places the protagonist in the role of classical heroine.
FIGURE 3 Valentine, Proteus, Sylvia and Giulia in the Forest (1788/89), oil on canvas.
The second painting for Boydell depicts the final scene of Two Gentlemen: another quartet in which Valentine intervenes to rescue Silvia from attempted rape by Proteus, while the cross-dressed Julia looks on ‘observing with sadness the infidelity of her beloved’.22 The forest setting is depicted as a landscape in the guise of bucolic backdrop, and the overall composition ‘shows Angelica’s best and most enticing way with colour – rococo pastel colours muted slightly, but not diluted to the point of boudoir prettiness’.23 The painting is constructed on a horizontal line up of gestures, readable from left to right, in the form of an almost unbroken continuum of ‘talking’ arms that takes us from Proteus’s thrusting aggressiveness to Valentine’s civilized protectiveness to Silvia’s alarmed self-defence to, finally, Julia’s shocked impotence. This movement across expressive limbs corresponds precisely to the narrative and dialogic sequentiality of the episode, beginning with Proteus’s ‘I’ll force thee yield to my desire.’ (59) and ending with Julia’s ‘O me unhappy!’ (84) prior to her fainting.
Angela Rosenthal justly notes the ‘subtle gradations of gendered corporeal differences’ at work in the picture, although she mistakenly identifies the character on the left as Valentine, observing that ‘the figures of Valentine and Julia resemble each other’;24 in reality the figure in question represents Proteus, impeded in his intents by the intervening Valentine sporting his Robin Hood-like outlaw costume. Thus the gender gradations are centred on the couple Proteus-Julia, both seen in clinging tights that suggest a specular Doppelgänger affinity while simultaneously accentuating their differences in musculature and attitude. Silvia’s discreet silken décolleté, meanwhile, reveals her soft and unambiguously feminine forms. Julia, physically marginal but dramatically central to the scene, embodies the androgyny of her cross-dressed role by mirroring Proteus corporeally and Silvia facially. Valentine himself betrays a certain softness of contour that associates him with Silvia, his face likewise resembling hers.
Much has been written about the androgyny or ‘effeminacy’ of Kauffman’s male figures, beginning with the barbed comment of the great German critic and translator of Shakespeare, August Wilhelm Schlegel:
the soft femininity in thoughts and words, which draws one to the paintings of Angelica Kauffman, now and then sneaks into the figures in an unpermitted manner: one can see in the eyes of her young boys that they would like far too much to have a girl’s breast, and if possible also such hips.25
Such dubious masculinity may be in part due to Kauffman’s lack of experience in the study of male anatomy, but it also reflects the neoclassical aesthetic ideals of her friend and mentor Winckelmann, for whom androgyny ‘represented the greatest perfection of Roman art’.26 At the same time, there is in much of Kauffman’s work a strategic eroding of gender confines, as if to underline a feminine and feminized reading of history and, more specifically, of Shakespeare himself.
Angelica Kauffman’s reputation, especially in Britain and the United States, rests primarily on her supposed ability as decorative artist, even if in reality there are only two examples of decorative art directly attributable to her, the rest being the work of copyists and engravers. With regard to her Shakespearian subjects, there is little doubt that the abundant prints, furniture, porcelain, snuff-boxes, cameos and needlework reproducing her portraits of the Bard and her scenes and characters from the plays contributed quite considerably to the ‘making’ of Shakespeare as, literally, a household name, in the precise period in which he was being set up as national icon in chief.27 Kauffman was not directly responsible for the domesticating effects of such reproductions, but they are not incompatible with the ‘feminizing’ character of her paintings, and she certainly encouraged the popularizing of her work through engraving and printing. Her popularity should not detract, however, from the seriousness and intelligence of her engagement with Shakespeare’s texts in some of the most illuminating pictorial representations of her age.
Notes
1See, for example, Stuart Sillars’s excellent Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820 (Cambridge, 2006).
2Charlotte Yeldham’s inventory of the paintings exhibited by women during the nineteenth century, for example, includes around 170 works dedicated to Shakespearian subjects (Women Artists in Nineteenth-century France and England (New York, 1984).
3Respectively, Shakespear Illustrated (1753), An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769) and The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (1775). See Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900. An Anthology of Criticism (Manchester, 1997), pp. 15–39.
4Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (London, 1769), p. 64.
5On Kauffman as historical painter, see Wendy W. Roworth ed., Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England (London, 1992), pp. 21–37. I am grateful to Wendy Wassyng Roworth for her generous advice regarding, among other matters, the Shakespearian provenance or otherwise of the paintings.
6Ronald Paulson ‘The Aesthetics of Mourning’, in Ralph Cohen ed., Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics (Berkeley, CA, 1985), pp. 148–81, p. 165.
7See Malise Forbes Adam and Mary Mauchline, ‘Kauffman’s Decorative Work’, in Wendy Wassyng Roworth, 1992, pp. 111–40, p. 132. Copies of the two paintings appear together in a 1786 secretaire-bookcase: see Roworth 1992, p. 126.
8Sarah Hyde, Exhibiting Gender (Manchester, 1997), p. 109.
9Angelica Kauffman, in Carlo Knight ed., La memoria delle piture (Rome, 1998), p. 17.
10Kauffman, p. 17. The painting was engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi and printed in 1784; see Roworth p. 185.
11W. J. T Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, 1994), p. 9
12See Kauffman, pp. 26–7.
13Kauffman, p. 17.
14The only actual performance of the play she was likely to have seen was Thomas Sheridan’s adaptation, performed regularly at Drury Lane from 1777 to 1786.
15Sillars (2006), p. 16.
16The print is reproduced in Thompson and Roberts 1997, p, 34.
17Boydell also commissioned two reliefs from the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer.
18Kauffman, p. 47.
19Frederick Burwick, in Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick eds, The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (Bottrop, 1996), p. 155.
20Burwick (1996), p. 155.
21Elizabeth Griffith, The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (London, 1775), p. 487; see Georgianna Ziegler, ‘Suppliant Women and Monumental Maidens: Shakespeare’s Heroines in the Boydell Gallery.’ In Burwick and Pape, 1996, pp. 89–102, p. 94.
22Kauffman, p. 47.
23Winifred H. Friedman, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (New York, 1976), p. 156.
24Angela Rosenthal, Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility (New Haven, CT and London, 2007), p. 199.
25Quoted in Rosenthal (2007), p. 191.
26Roworth (1992), p. 83.
27See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford, 1992).