These three drawings were made by Angelica Kauffman in preparation for a remarkable publication, John Bell’s The Poets of Great Britain. This inexpensive, well-produced pocket series made poetry widely available and eventually ran to 109 volumes. Bell, a serial entrepreneur and innovator, employed a roster of celebrated artists to illustrate the frontispieces for each of his major publishing ventures. Kauffman was responsible for a number of the frontispiece drawings for The Poets of Great Britain including for the volumes dedicated to Richard Savage, George, Lord Lyttleton and Charles Churchill. Kauffman’s carefully worked drawings express, in miniature, her skills as a designer: compressing legible narrative into a circumscribed format. Made on the eve of her departure from Britain, these wonderfully fluid and exquisitely rendered drawings underscore the importance of the London print trade to Kauffman and her European reputation.
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.
It was in London that Kauffman also formed important relationships with engravers and print publishers. In 1772 the engraver William Wynne Ryland commissioned a mezzotint after Kauffman entitled Queen Charlotte Raising the Genius of the Fine Arts. Ryland and Kauffman formed a particularly close association, Ryland producing a series of stipple engravings after Kauffman’s works. These highly decorative prints were widely disseminated and imitated contributing to the popularity of Kauffman as a designer. Kauffman joined a roster of notable artists in contributing work for John Bell’s The Poets of Great Britain, John Hamilton Mortimer produced some 41 designs with others being made by Thomas Stothard, Edward Edwards, Biagio Rebecca and Giovanni Battista Cipriani. Each frontispiece follows the same format: a scene illustrative of a poem is contained in a roundel, above a cartouche is left for the name of the poet and below a second cartouche contains the lines of the poem being illustrated. Kauffman’s drawings, like those by Mortimer, are the same size as the plates, which were engraved by leading artists. In the case of Kauffman’s three designs, two by Jean Marie Delattre and the third by Francesco Bartolozzi.
Kauffman’s elegant drawings demonstrate her ability to communicate complex, multi-figural action on a small scale. The first illustrates a passage from The Wanderer by Richard Savage, showing the Wanderer seated amongst the muses. The second illustrates lines from Gotham by Charles Churchill, with a dynamic and compact family scene. The third illustrates a line from The Progress of Love by George, Lord Lyttleton and shows the shepherd Damon, abandoning his flock to contemplate his love. Each of the drawings is worked in ink and wash over black chalk and is the same size as the published print. These drawings underscore how important the print trade was to Kauffman as her biographer noted of one particularly popular composition: ‘the prints… circulated all over Europe. In the elegant manufactures of London, Birmingham &c. it assumed an incalculable variety of forms and dimensions, and was transferred to numerous articles of all sorts and sizes, from a watch-case to a tea-waiter.’