The National Gallery in London has acquired a key work by the Swiss 18th-century artist Angelica Kauffman, bringing the number of works in the 2,400-strong collection by women artists to 28.
The painting, entitled Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes (1787-88), was donated by the Dallas-based collectors Richard and Luba Barrett, alongside two other works: Portrait of Louis Montchal (1885) by Ferdinand Hodler and Four Large Trees (before 1850) by Alexandre Calame.
Kauffman’s work depicts a Greek mythological scene during the Trojan War in which the hero Achilles has been hidden by his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, on the island of Skyros. The piece is an oil study for a late 18th-century painting commissioned by Catherine the Great which is housed at the Scientific-Research Museum of the Academy of Arts of Russia in St Petersburg.
Born in 1741, Kauffman lived at a time when combining professional success with social popularity was rare for women. Yet she gained wealth and fame through her painting, even managing to get the Venetian painter she married aged 39 to sign a prenup ensuring she retained full control of her finances. Scholars, however, largely ignored her achievements until recent decades. Her reputation continues to grow following exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London in 2024 and at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in 2020.
“Kauffman had enjoyed a successful career in London, where she was one of only two female painters to be founding members of the [RA in] 1768, before going on to Rome where she would paint this picture,” says a National Gallery statement. A previous work by Kauffman in the National Gallery collection, which was transferred to the National Gallery of British Art in 1897 (now Tate Britain), is thought to have been destroyed during the Second World War.
The three works acquired are now on display at the gallery in Trafalgar Square. Kauffman’s work is in Room 37, while Hodler’s portrait is displayed in Room 44; Calame’s Four Large Trees can be seen in Room 39.
Richard and Luba Barrett are Dallas-based collectors who specialise in Swiss art from the 14th to the 20th centuries. The Barrett Collection was founded in the 1990s by Richard and his late wife, Nona Barrett, who died in 2014.
In 2018 the Barretts pledged a gift of more than 400 works by Swiss artists which was due to form the nucleus of a museum to open at the University of Texas at Dallas. The collection is now scheduled to go on show at the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum cultural complex, named after the Dallas philanthropists who donated $32m to build it, the first phase of which opened to the public in late 2024.