Zoffany

When Johan Zoffany painted his fellow founding members of the new Royal Academy in 1771-72, he solved the dilemma of portraying its first two female members, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, by leaving them out of the group but painting their images, framed as portraits, on the wall.

Not least, the emblematic Zoffany story, so telling on the limits to female artists’ professional advancement, has been told before, by art historians Linda Nochlin, in the 1971 article that launched feminist art history, and by Whitney Chadwick in 1990.

A portrait of him by Johan Zoffany still hangs, a little lopsidedly, in the Kolkata High Court.

This a portrait of Jane Austen the novelist by Zoffany.

The note names the artist Johann Zoffany, to whom the painting has been attributed in the past.