Whitney Chadwick

Woman's place in the history of Western art is nowhere more clearly articulated
than in Johann Zoffany's group portrait, The Academicians of the Royal Academy
(1772). Painted for King George III on the occasion of the opening of new draw-
ing studios for the Royal Academy school, it depicts the Royal Academicians
in the life drawing studio. Among the founding members of the Academy in 1768
were two women: the painters Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser. Kauffmann,
elected to the prestigious Academy of Saint Luke in Rome in 1765, hailed as
the successor to Van Dyke on her arrival in London, and credited, along with
Gavin Hamilton and Benjamin West, with popularizing Neoclassicism in England,
was one of the most successful artists of her day. Moser, whose reputation at
the time rivalled Kauffmann's, was one of only two floral painters accepted into
the Academy. Yet there is no place for Kauffmann and Moser in Zoffany's paint-
ing. Neither is shown among the artists casually grouped around the male model
learnedly discussing the nude, the study of which formed the basis for all aca-
demic training and representation from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Women were prohibited from the presence of the nude model, barred from the
training that opened the door to artistic success in France and England and, after
Kauffmann and Moser, barred from membership in the Royal Academy itself
until 1922 when Annie Louisa Swynnerton became an Associate Member. Thus
Zoffany, whose painting is as much about the ideal of the academic aritst as it
is about the Royal Academicians, has inserted them into art history as represen-
tation, as the objects of art rather than as its producers. ¹

Zoffany's painting reiterates woman's marginal place in the history of western
painting and sculpture and her traditionally passive role as the object of male
contemplation in a history of art commonly traced through "Old Masters" and

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