National Gallery Adds Rare Angelica Kauffman, Raising Its Count of Works by Women Artists
The National Gallery in London has acquired a notable work by Angelica Kauffman, the Swiss painter whose career helped define the possibilities available to women artists in the 18th century. The painting, Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes (1787-88), was donated by Dallas collectors Richard and Luba Barrett and is now on view in Trafalgar Square.
The gift did not arrive alone. The Barretts also donated Portrait of Louis Montchal (1885) by Ferdinand Hodler and Four Large Trees (before 1850) by Alexandre Calame. All three works are now installed in the museum, with Kauffman in Room 37, Hodler in Room 44, and Calame in Room 39.
Kauffman’s painting is an oil study for a larger late 18th-century work commissioned by Catherine the Great, now held at the Scientific-Research Museum of the Academy of Arts of Russia in St Petersburg. The subject comes from Greek myth: Achilles, hidden by his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, on the island of Skyros during the Trojan War, is discovered among the daughters of Lycomedes.
Born in 1741, Kauffman achieved a level of professional success that was unusual for a woman of her time. She gained wealth and public recognition through her painting, and she was among the two female founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. Her reputation, long overshadowed in scholarship, has strengthened in recent years, including through exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2024 and at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in 2020.
The National Gallery said Kauffman had enjoyed a successful career in London before moving to Rome, where she painted this work. The museum also noted that a previous Kauffman in its collection, later transferred to the National Gallery of British Art in 1897 and now Tate Britain, is thought to have been destroyed during the Second World War.
The acquisition brings the National Gallery’s holdings by women artists to 28 within a collection of 2,400 works. That number remains small, but the addition is meaningful: it places one of the period’s most accomplished women painters more visibly within the museum’s permanent narrative.
The Barrett Collection, founded in the 1990s by Richard Barrett and his late wife, Nona Barrett, has long specialized in Swiss art from the 14th to the 20th centuries. In 2018, the Barretts also pledged more than 400 works by Swiss artists to the University of Texas at Dallas. The collection is now scheduled to be shown at the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum cultural complex, named for the Dallas philanthropists who donated $32 million to build it, with the first phase opening to the public in late 2024.
For the National Gallery, the new gift adds both historical depth and a clearer line of continuity between its collection and the wider history of women’s artistic achievement.
