Oil painting on canvas, Self-portrait the Artist hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting by Angelica Kauffman RA (Chur 1741 ¿ Rome 1807), signed on the artist's sash: Angelica Kauffn Sc. & P. Pinxit, Rome 1794. Angelica Kauffman was born in Switzerland, but settled in London in 1766. She was one of the most prominent English artists of the 18th Century, one of only two founding female members of the Royal Academy and the last woman to be admitted until 1922. This painting, which is a very fine example of her work, was executed in Rome, where she lived with her husband, Antonio Zucchi, from 1781 until her death in 1807. It presents the artist as a kind of female Hercules, choosing not between Virtue and Vice, but between her profession as a painter, which was traditionally a male dominated field (the figure of Painting points to a far away temple, symbolising the difficulty of her journey), and a career devoted to the easier, more traditionally feminine, Art of Music. In recent years, this self-portrait has become an icon of the feminist interpretation of art history. It was acquired by the 2nd Baron St Oswald in 1908, from the collection of Mrs Strickland at Cokethorpe, to serve as a pendant to the Lockey, at the opposite end of the Top Hall (once the organ, installed in the 1820s, had been removed to Wragby Church). The 2nd Baron may have been attracted to the painting because it was thought at the time that Kauffman, rather than Zucchi, had worked with Adam on the decoration at Nostell. It remained in the Top Hall until 1939. Though it came relatively late to the collection, it is now a well known picture at Nostell. Another version, dated 1792, is in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.
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Herakleia am Scheideweg

Eine entlaufene Allegorie zum Frauentag und ein Beitrag zum Thema „Heldinnen! Es ist einer der Ur-Erziehungsgeschichten schlechthin. Sie spielt im antiken Griechenland und erzählt, wie der junge Herakles, in der Blüte seiner Helden-Adoleszenz und in Erwartung großer Dinge, über sein weiteres Leben nachdenkt und dabei an einen Scheideweg gerät, einen innerlichen wie einen äußerlichen, gefasst […]