Women were barred from attending the life classes which would have enabled them

Women were barred from attending the life classes which would have enabled them to depict muscle and sinew with classical accuracy. Kauffman only slipped once: she contracted an ill-advised marriage with a bogus Count in London and, in terror for her reputation, hastily extricated herself.This was the era of sensibility, where for both women and men the heart was in a complex dialogue with the rational demands of logic and the brain. She perhaps underestimates the extent to which Kauffman’s restraint and propriety as a painter and as a person – indeed, a kind of superhuman purity of character – were crucial to her acceptance as a woman presenting her wares in the public world of barter and sale. Discussing Kauffman’s (not very distinguished) work in the exalted genre of history painting, Goodden becomes alarmingly severe, like a schoolteacher disappointed in a promising pupil. On other occasions, though, a biography can suffer from an odd kind of mental indigestion, as this one does.

The British abroad were not always so cultured: John Damer, whose aristocratic wife was painted by Kauffman, didn’t bother on his Grand Tour with the paintings in the Uffizi, but “laid bets with his companion as to who could hop to the end of the gallery first”.It isn’t vital, of course, for biographers to like those whose lives they anatomise – sometimes this can be a hindrance. Sometimes their company is delightful – we meet the Livonian Count whose servants spoke only in recitative, who “gave all his orders in musical form”, and who made his visitors converse by way of vocal improvisations. Along with Angelica, the reader is ushered into the presence of all those Enlightenment royals, radicals, eccentrics and grandees who vied for one of her portraits to set off the exuberant plasterwork of their reception rooms. Goodden explains the recipe for her international stature: adding one part ethereal genius to two parts shrewd businesswoman, Kauffman skilfully magicked away any signs of the latter.
Goodden illuminates Kauffman’s psychologically penetrating, sometimes superb portraits, and, though very little documentary evidence of her life survives, has used a multitude of sources to produce not only an assessment of her significance but also an overview of the Enlightenment art world and its (mostly) aristocratic patrons.

Reynolds’ “Miss Angel” was an extraordinary figure: canny, talented and dogged, she was praised for her masculine energy by Herder and befriended by Goethe. Agile self-publicists, she and Reynolds were good friends, if not – as gossip suggested – lovers, as Angelica Goodden points out in this responsible and scholarly survey of Kauffman’s life and times. A “Raphael among women”, she was especially f?d in England, where she lived for 14 years and was appointed a founder member of the newly-formed Royal Academy. Yet the Saltram portrait of 1767 depicts a less authoritative and confident man, in whose face a subtly captured anxiety belies the Enlightenment poise of his pose and setting. The artist was the first major internationally recognised woman painter, the Swiss-born Angelica Kauffman. On the staircase at Saltram House, a reverently preserved stately home of England, hangs a portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose own expansive brush painted the flower of later 18th-century society. At the opening of the Tate Britain Reynolds exhibition (still showing) much was made of his central role in the creation of a cult of celebrity and his capacity for self-advertisement.

Wolfenden, which was also a report into street prostitution, persuaded the law to go after the “real perverts”: those who had sex with men in semi-public places. All male sexual contact involving those under 21, those staying in hostels or hotels, rooming houses or prison (they were not “in private”), those seeking partners in parks and pubic toilets, and those serving in the Armed Forces and Merchant Navy, remained illegal. In other words: those “normal men” most likely to take part in homosex in the earlier part of the 20th century.Meanwhile, the public visibility of homosexuality that Wolfenden made possible (but didn’t intend) helped to hasten the privatisation of homosex in the homosexual world and the homosexual body.It’s probably just more sour grapes on my part, but it’s tempting to conclude that the law reforms of the last few years, such as the equalisation of the age of consent, ending the ban in the Armed Forces and Merchant Navy and relaxation of the laws against “indecency” in public, happened not so much because of the tireless campaigns by gay equality reformers, or even the intervention of the European Court of Human Rights, but simply because, one or two cruisey parks aside, most “traditional activities” in London had already come to an end.. This is why prosecutions for indecency actually doubled in the 10 years following “decriminalisation” in 1967 (many of those convicted were married). Wildeblood famously met the airman McNally in a Piccadilly Circus subway; Trevor-Roper was cautioned by a policeman in St James’s Park, a veritable bazaar for strapping Guardsman during the war.To which I might add that for Wolfenden the “real perverts” were not the “congenital inverts”, but the “otherwise normal men” who took part in these aberrant activities, often in public.