Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryThe Muse
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Compare the soft brown tones of the aquatint in the shadows and the stone behind her with the fine etched lines that shape her drapery.
A young woman in loose classical dress leans on a stone block among ruins and gazes aside. Angelica Kauffmann etched the plate herself, and the lettering at lower left names her as both painter and printmaker. The Art Institute of Chicago dates it to 1766, when she had settled in London; there she became one of the two women among the Royal Academy’s founders.
Etching with aquatint, on ivory laid paper · Image: 19.5 × 15.5 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Neoclassicism
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- The Muse
- Artist
- Angelica Kauffmann Swiss, 1741-1807
- Date
- 1766
- Medium
- Etching with aquatint, on ivory laid paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 19.5 × 15.5 cm (7 11/16 × 6 1/8 in.); Plate: 21.5 × 16.5 cm (8 1/2 × 6 1/2 in.); Sheet: 23.5 × 18.5 cm (9 5/16 × 7 5/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Purchased with funds provided by Sondra Ward Eisenberg in honor of the Docent Program of The Art Institute of Chicago
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.