Desk Notes No.24

Angelica Kauffman & Ann Radcliffe: Smiles, Sentiment & Female Oppression

Mar 31, 2024

Dear friends,

Last month I wrote about the poet John Clare and his walk from Epping Forest to Northampton in the 1840s. Since then I’ve been reading through a selection of his poetry, rich in his local flora and fauna. In The Wren, Clare laments that just a handful of birds — the cuckoo and the nightingale — attract the attention of poets.

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Is there no other bird
Of nature’s minstrelsy that oft hath raised 
One’s heart to ecstasy and mirth as well?

It’s Clare’s intimacy with nature that makes his writing so affecting. His connection with the wren comes from moments shared.

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I judge not how another’s taste is caught—
With mine there’s other birds that bear the bell, 
Whose song hath crowds of happy memories brought, 
Such the wood Robin singing in the dell
And little Wren that many a time hath sought
Shelter from showers in huts where I did dwell

It’s a sentiment I feel close to. As a suburban gardener, the blackbird and the robin are my closest friends. It’s the blackbird who wakes me early, inviting shyer birds to join the song. It’s the robin who waits patiently for me to turn the soil. Then there’s the yellow bellied blue tit flitting through the lilacs while I make coffee. And the portly wood-pigeon who bobs in the grass, cooing for a mate. I feel a flurry of excitement when a rare gold crest alights, but it’s the ordinary birds that comfort me day after day. And it’s the ordinary birds I think of most fondly.

At the end of Clare’s poem it’s his familiar companion, the wren, who returns “to tell / The happy stories of the past again” — nature entwined with memory. A few weeks ago, when we scattered my Uncle’s ashes, it was the humble blackbird who came out to sing.

Pictures — Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) at the Royal Academy of Arts until 30 June 2024

Print — A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe, first published in 1790

Pictures

Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) at the Royal Academy of Arts until 30 June 2024

Welcoming visitors to the Royal Academy period of Angelica Kauffman’s career is a seemingly innocuous picture of its founding members. That is, until you look closely. The two female founders, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, are excluded from the scene which Zoffany has set in the life-drawing room — a part of the Academy from which women were barred for their own moral protection. The male artists gather in lively fashion, leaning towards each other in eager conversation, studiously remarking on the arrangement of their naked male model. Zoffany fudges Kauffman and Moser into the scene by picturing their portraits on the wall. There they hang, washed out in stiff profile; static and remote. Their eyes are averted from the male model, and cruelly, from the fever of intellectualism below. No-one is looking at them; they are forgotten and dismissed.

Standing beneath this picture, feeling ever more incensed, my thoughts turned to the passages in Thomas Hardy’s Jude where, more than 100 years later, the menfolk discuss their moral responsibility for the women in their lives. Sue Bridehead begs release from her husband Phillotson, to live with her lover Jude. Phillotson rejects society’s advice and lets her go.

“I, like other men, profess to hold that if a husband gets such a so-called preposterous request from his wife, the only course that can possibly be regarded as right and proper and honourable in him is to refuse it, and put her virtuously under lock and key, and murder her lover perhaps. But is that essentially right, and proper, and honourable, or is it contemptibly mean and selfish?”

For Phillotson, Sue’s morality “is a question for herself.” He accepts Sue has her own agency. But this is not a popular opinion, even among the novel’s womenfolk. Arabella says, “There’s nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women.” And even Sue’s ardent lover Jude blames himself for encouraging her to leave her husband, “without me perhaps you wouldn’t have urged him to let you go.” Men continued to feel responsible for policing female morality.

What’s most striking about Zoffany’s picture is the male artists’ complicity with the women’s oppression. In her fascinating book, The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie asks, “why Angelica and Mary’s colleagues didn’t suggest moving to a location where the women would be allowed to be seen in their rightful place alongside the men.” She remarks on the absurdity that women artists could be corrupted by the sight of the naked male body — “it makes you wonder how women of the time ever got pregnant” — before concluding that Zoffany’s portraits of the women were not even a good effort: “near un-recognisable.” No matter how innocent, Zoffany’s picture reveals male and female academy members were not of equal value.

In Kauffman’s own work, we discover a woman unafraid to face this prejudice. Self-portrait at the Crossroads between the Arts of Music and Painting (1794), shows the artist as a young woman choosing between personifications of her two great talents. The first, Music, holds her hand and draws it in, entreating Kauffman to stay. Music sits on the ledge of a building — said to represent the private, domestic domain of femininity. Kauffman was a talented clavichord player, but Music has a look of defeat in her eyes. Kauffman pictures herself turning away; the open palm of her hand gesturing towards Art, “I must go.” Art is energetic, vigorous, bold. She points up towards the outdoor landscape — the public realm of men. There is urgency in the figure of Art, “come,” she seems to be saying, “there is so much more to do.” Kauffman agreed.

Many of the paintings on display here show Kauffman empowering female figures, from Eleanora Sucking the Venom Out of the Wound of Her Husband, King Edward (1776) to Death of Alcestis (1790). And yet her allegorical portraits are also imbued with inviting softness. Having recently happened upon an article about the history of smiles, I was drawn to Emma Hamilton painted as the Muse of Comedy (1791), her lips gently parted to reveal two white teeth. While the smile held sexual promise — “the glimpse of an open mouth could spark the fantasy that an invitation to kiss might follow” — it also invites our emotion. Jonathan Beckman explains how the smile was made newly acceptable with the sentimental novel popularised by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), which we read as a group last year. Here characters cried and laughed — “the partition between emotion and its expression came down, and a person’s self was supposedly revealed.” Emotions were displayed on faces and readers shared in their expression. Empathy became the currency of the novel, making it a runaway success with women. Such was the cultural atmosphere into which Kauffman’s portraits were born. The unabashed femininity of her pictures feels both pioneering and just.

Print

A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe (1790)

At the end of the eighteenth century the heightened emotions of the sentimental novel evolved into gothic fiction and romanticism. Ann Radcliffe, perhaps best known for her gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, published her first three novels anonymously, until certain the style was a success. The second of her novels, A Sicilian Romance, has all the hallmarks of the genre — dramatic scenery, mysterious ruins, the intrusion of a distant past, suggestions of the supernatural, exaggerated emotion, romance, and cruelty. It’s unputdownable action — a series of sensational traps and thrilling escapes.

In sixteenth century Sicily, Julia falls in love with Count Hippolitus. Her father, the Marquis Mazzini, refuses the match preferring the much older, crueler Duke de Luovo whose wealth invites his ambition. On the cusp of this forced marriage, Julia is enticed away by her lover. There’s more than a whisper of Clarissa here but Radcliffe gives her heroine considerably more pep — Julia is not content to sit back and watch her life peter out. Meanwhile, readers of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) will find the novel’s location — a remote mansion with secret quarters from which emit strange noises and suspicious strangers — delightfully familiar.

The Mazzini sisters, Julia and Emilia, have been cited as inspiration for the Dashwood sisters in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. On a similar theme to Kauffman’s Self-portrait at the Crossroads between the Arts of Music and Painting, the sisters each embrace different passions, representing their temperaments. Julia Mazzini and Marianne Dashwood choose music, demonstrating their excess sentiment; while Emilia and Eleanor devote their time to drawing, representing good sense. Northanger Abbey might be a satire of the gothic approach, but the Victorians would find inspiration in Radcliffe for decades, with Christina Rossetti embarking on a biography of her life in 1883.

Once the supernatural mystery of the Mazzini castle is established, the action shifts to Julia’s escape from her father’s tyranny. We must wait for the story’s two strands to coalesce. In an epic journey across Sicily (all the time pursued by the wicked Marquis) the dramatic landscape entwines with bodily sensation and emotion. It’s clear Radcliffe was familiar with Edmund Burke’s writing on the sublime — mountains, forests, and caves are not simply beautiful, but overpowering and irresistible, inspiring both awe and fear. The danger is palpable. Bloodthirsty robbers, power-hungry monks, and vengeful suitors pose equal threat.

“After travelling for some hours, they quitted the main road, and turned into a narrow winding dell, overshadowed by high trees, which almost excluded the light. The gloom of the place inspired terrific images. Julia trembled as she entered; and her emotion was heightened, when she perceived at some distance, through the long perspective of the trees, a large ruinous mansion. The gloom of the surrounding shades partly concealed it from her view; but, as she drew near, each forlorn and decaying feature of the fabric was gradually disclosed, and struck upon her heart a horror such as she had never before experienced. The broken battlements, enwreathed with ivy, proclaimed the fallen grandeur of the place, while the shattered vacant window-frames exhibited its desolation, and the high grass that overgrew the threshold seemed to say how long it was since mortal foot had entered. The place appeared fit only for the purposes of violence and destruction: and the unfortunate captives, when they stopped at its gates, felt the full force of its horrors.”

As the novel builds to a dramatic conclusion and secrets are revealed, Radcliffe’s focus on female oppression never wavers. While Julia has more agency than Samuel Richardson’s earlier heroines, she is nonetheless dependent on the choices of powerful men capable of recognising what she has to offer as an individual. The support of courageous women is no match for men consumed by the politics of power (the dynamics of which Radcliffe sharply captures) and Julia inevitably finds herself in need of daring rescue. Her final choice in the caves beneath Mazzini palace is one of solidarity and strength. As the last pages turn, Radcliffe closes with a moral, offering a powerful sense that no-one can keep good women down for long.

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