ABSTRACT
For Angelica Kauffman, there is no conflict between the rational woman and the mother. The countess of Galloway is represented as an educator, teaching her daughter how to draw. And in a daring iconic shift, Kauffman represents herself as a "nursing artist," her drawing pad and pencil held to her breast in the position of a nursing infant, in her 1784 self-portrait now in the Munich Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen. Kauffman's females are women who choose to be involved in relationships with others. Where she typically portrays her male sitters as isolated figures, accompanied by the tools of their trade, she represents her female sitters as actively interacting with other living things, whether animals (the Honourable Caroline Curzon holds a bird) or flowers (as in her portraits of Mrs. Samuel Whitbread and Ann Seymour Damer) or, most often, a family member, either a sister (as in her portrait of the duchess of Devonshire and Lady Duncannon) or a child (as in her portraits of Mrs. Rushout and her daughter, the marchioness of Townshend and her son, the duchess of Brunswick and her child, the Lady Elizabeth Hervey and her daughter, or the marchioness of Lothian and her son). Kauffman thus subtly suggests that the subjectivity of her female sitters is a relational one, one that actively engages them in a sympathetic correspondence with the surrounding world.
