New collaborative doctoral award announced

Posted on 10 February 2025

We are pleased to announce a new collaborative doctoral award in partnership with the National Trust on At Home with Angelica Kauffman: The Material and Print Culture of an Eighteenth-Century Artist.

Image credit: Porcelain figure group, Two Virgins Awakening Cupid, by William Duesbury & Co, Derby, after Angelica Kauffman, c1778-90 © National Trust / Robert Thrift

Applications are invited for a funded collaborative doctoral award based at the University of York’s Department of English and Related Literature in collaboration with the National Trust

Project summary

Angelica Kauffman was one of the most renowned and recognizable artists in the eighteenth century. Her oil paintings, prints, and engravings were widely reproduced for and by British consumers.

This project seeks to reexamine the reproduction, retranslation and consumption of Kauffman’s visual artworks, focusing on three-dimensional, small-scale works including ceramics, needlework, textiles (embroidery and needle pictures), and fans, among others. Drawing on the National Trust's extensive collections, including print and manuscript sources, the project will show, for the first time, the rich and varied depth of Kauffman's influence on aesthetics and the domestic interior.

PhD project 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.

The project will uncover how Kauffman's artworks stretched beyond the walls of the Royal Academy and into the everyday domestic lives of eighteenth-century Britons when they were reproduced by professional and amateur artisans and makers. It will attend to 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.

This project seeks to understand Kauffman's visual and material presence in the eighteenth-century domestic interior. It will ask:

● What was the influence and impact of Angelica Kauffman's paintings on the material culture of the late 18th and early 19th centuries - from factories to homes? How can this be read in the context of the artist's gender?

● What role did print culture and manuscripts (e.g. letters) play in the meaning and circulation of Kauffman's visual artworks?

● What might it mean for artisans and consumers to handle Kauffman's works in different forms, such as carrying a Kauffman fan in a pocket or drinking from a Kauffman teacup? What role did scale play in those experiences? What cultural meanings were attached to these objects by their owners and how did they shape social interactions?

● What significance was attached to the original source as it was retranslated and consumed by different hands? What was the role of prints and engravings as intermediaries in this process?

The project will identify and facilitate the documentation of decorative art objects in the National Trust's collection that incorporate, or are based on compositions by Kauffman, with scope for the student to make new connections and further develop visual, material and cultural themes. Research could encompass pieces produced in industrial contexts by manufacturers such as Wedgwood and Derby Porcelain, through to those of individual amateurs.

The National Trust has significant holdings of artworks by Angelica Kauffman, notably at Saltram, as well as Stourhead, Nostell, Osterley and Petworth. Their collections also include an abundance of prints and engravings after Kauffman which were often used to inform designs. Print and manuscript records also document the consumption practices, circulation and understanding of Kauffman's aesthetics, and will help with the interpretation of how Britons encountered and responded to Kauffman in the home. The research will also draw on works (through digital databases) in other public collections to contextualise the Trust's holdings. This project will place Kauffman at the cutting edge of new approaches to material culture studies that seek to break down barriers between high art and popular culture.

Further details on how to apply.