Current PhD Students

Eleanor Brooke-Peat

Thesis Title:

At Home with Angelica Kauffman: The Material and Print Culture of an Eighteenth-Century Artist

Supervisors:

Professor Chloe Wigston Smith

Dr Rachel Conroy

Description:

Angelica Kauffman has long been acknowledged for her important contributions to eighteenth-century visual culture. An innovative portraitist and history painter, she was one of only two women artists to be founding members of the Royal Academy. Scholarship on Kauffman has emphasised her place within hierarchies of eighteenth-century visual culture and metropolitan exhibition practices. This project will shift scholarly and public understanding of Kauffman's much broader influence on eighteenth-century aesthetics and the domestic interior by showing the depth of her visual and social reach. It will take an interdisciplinary approach, shaped by material culture studies, to unearth the wealth of material, print, and manuscript responses to and adaptations of Kauffman's artworks.

This WRoCAH-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award project, in partnership with the National Trust, will uncover how Kauffman's artworks stretched beyond the walls of the Royal Academy and into the everyday domestic lives of eighteenth-century Britons. It will attend to the reproduction of these artworks by professional and amateur artisans and makers, and particularly the generative creative partnership between Kauffman and Francesco Bartolozzi, whose distinctive use of stipple engravings, oval shapes, and coloured inks, helped to define the Kauffman look as it circulated in popular culture and was applied to other media. Kauffman's art was importantly applied to a range of materials in the home, becoming part of its very fabric and people's everyday lives.

Eleanor has a background in Country House curatorship, with a specialist interest in the decorative arts and interior decoration.