Why is Achilles disguised as a woman? | National Gallery

Beautiful pink dress, gorgeous golden locks, brandishing a sword. Why is Achilles, Ancient Greece's greatest warrior, here disguised as a woman? Hello, I'm Francesca. I'm the curator of later Italian, Spanish and French paintings here at the National Gallery and I'm talking about this picture, Angelica Kauffman's Achilles Discovered Amongst the Daughters of Lycomedes. Angelica Kauffman was one of the most celebrated and renowned artists of the 18th century. Kauffman really worked for the very highest level of patrons in Europe. So we know that she painted for George III of Britain, Queen Caroline of Naples, the Emperor of Austria. She is really at the top of her game. She was a huge celebrity and her paintings garnered enormous prices. This picture was painted while Kauffman was working for the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia and it's a story that comes from ancient Greek myth. Achilles is the son of a king and a senior and it's prophesied when he's young that he will either, if he doesn't go to fight in the Trojan War, live a very long but ultimately forgettable life or that if he does go and fight in the Trojan War, he will win eternal glory. But the price to pay for that is dying tragically young. And so his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, desperate to try and save her son from his fate, hides him among the daughters of Lycomedes. She dresses him in woman's clothes, he is disguised and he goes to live among the king's daughters. And here, when he's among the king's daughters, he actually ends up having a relationship with one of them, the princess Deidamia and they have a daughter together. But the moment that Kaufmann is painting is the moment where Achilles is discovered. So Ulysses is the figure we see here at the left of the painting. He's sort of widely regarded as the most cunning, the most clever, the most intelligent of the Greek soldiers. It's him, after all, who comes up with the idea of the Trojan horse. And he has come to the daughters of King Lycomedes and he's brought them gifts. He's brought them gifts of jewels but also weapons. And instinctively, Achilles, the great warrior, the greatest warrior the Greeks are ever going to have, picks up the sword and not the necklaces. And in doing so, his true identity is revealed. Kaufmann is working in a period that we talk about art historically as neoclassicism. So it's this moment in the second half of the 18th century where across Europe, artists went back to the classical past and they looked at classical sculptures, at classical dress, at the ways in which stories were told visually in the classical world, and they took those tools and they transposed them to their own pictures. And Kaufmann is absolutely a proponent of this neoclassical taste. And you can see here that she's arranged her composition almost as if it's an antique frieze. So if you think about the kind of stories that are told on Greek vases where you have those kind of shallow sculptures that go all the way around, you don't get much depth. You kind of tell your story almost like a cartoon. I think we really see that here, that she's arranged all her figures basically in one line across the canvas. I think Kaufmann really invites us to encounter this story from left to right. So here at the left edge of the painting, we see the figure of Ulysses who's figured out, in fact, he has discovered Achilles here in his disguise. And we see him with his arm outstretched, this very, very strong gesture, identifying the man who's here disguised in women's clothes. At the heart of the composition, we see Achilles himself with the weapons raised. So he's revealed himself. He couldn't help himself but pick up this sword and show his true nature. And then to the right, we see the daughters of Lycomedes. And it's this wonderful kind of array of different reactions. One sister sort of pointing as if to say, what is that really? Others kind of turning around. I love the sister who's at the right, who like something really dramatic is happening, but she's still rifling through the jewellery box. You know, the jewels that have been brought, frankly, to her are more exciting than this great moment of revelation, which is the nature of the painting. One of the really remarkable things about Kaufmann is she's both enormously respected and accomplished as a portraitist, but she also is regarded as a history painter. And when we talk about history painting, we're talking about the narrative scenes, depicting myths or episodes of history, classical history. It's quite unusual for anyone in the 18th century, but I think especially a woman, to be able to command two such different genres that have such different demands. You know, if you're a portraitist, you're working with people. They're coming and sitting for you. You have to be personable. You have to be able to flatter them to some degree. It's a very sort of intimate relationship. Whereas if you're a history painter, in some ways you're taking on a much grander challenge or you're trying to situate yourself in the great kind of canon of art history. You're telling really complicated stories. You're working at a huge scale. Often you're working for really, truly the greatest and grandest patrons. So to me, what's incredible about Kaufmann is that she manages to do all of that and be a woman and, you know, have a salon that people want to come and visit. She sort of somehow seems to combine all these things into this enormously successful European career. This picture is what we would call a modello. And by modello, we mean a preparatory work. So it's not the final big composition, but it's a very highly finished work made in preparation for the final painting. We know that Kaufmann is commissioned by the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia to paint this scene. But if you're painting for the Empress of Russia, number one, that's a huge and possibly rather daunting task. But number two, she's asked for a very large finished work. And you wouldn't start as an artist straight onto that large-scale finished painting. I think we should think about the artistic process moving from, you know, the initial sketches where you might work out an idea or think about some of your figures and maybe some of their poses, you know, even on sheets of paper. You might then think about the finished canvas and the, you know, the canvas that will ultimately be delivered to your patron. And this modello, I think, really sits in the middle of that process. So if you look at Achilles in this beautiful purple fabric, actually, if you really look closely, you can see that it's not just purple, but that she's really mixing the red and the blue and purple tones together to create this almost shimmering, changing silk with its rich colours. We can look at Ulysses and the decoration on his tunic and the way that his clothes, not only the way they hang and they fall, but the fact they're embellished. You know, she's thinking about all these final details. She's really sort of making a map for herself for where these final details are going to appear in the finished painting. We know that there are gridding lines underneath, and this is a process that's known as squaring up, where if you've made your modello, you're like, it's not small, this picture, but it's not as big as the final composition. If you're an artist, you then draw a kind of grid across that picture so that when you're moving from a smaller canvas to a bigger canvas, you can draw square to square, and that helps you keep your composition together. It helps keep everything in the same scale. So while this isn't necessarily painted for the Empress herself, it's all part of this many months-long process of producing a work for someone like Catherine the Great. And Catherine the Great is one of Europe's great artistic patrons. She has one of the most spectacular collections of, at that time, contemporary but also old master art. She's working with all the great artists across Europe, and as a woman, she's particularly interested in female artists, and so I think that must be why she approaches Kaufman to paint this subject for her. You know, the background to this is this very kind of masculine-dominated narrative of war and violence. Actually, for me, I think what's so interesting here is that what we're seeing, this scene, it really comes about as the result of a lot of female action and a lot of female agency. So the whole reason that Achilles is hidden here is because his mother, Thetis, has tried to save him from his fate. For me, the figure I'm most drawn to in this painting, and I think it's maybe the silent heroine, is this figure here, Princess Deidamia, who's the woman, the daughter of Lycomedes, with whom Achilles has had this relationship during the period in which he's been disguised. And I can't help but feel that Kaufman really draws our eye to this figure. If we look at her outfit here, we see her in white and gold, this very, very bright yellow that draws our eye to it. It's beautifully painted. I think Kaufman's really spent a long time thinking about the fall and fold of fabric there, about details like the armband, the decoration. But for me, actually, what I really love is that gesture, the hand. And it's so clever, I think, that the artist has chosen to silhouette that gesture against the pink of Achilles' dress. Because to me, it's such a gesture of protection and wanting to reach out to somebody that we love. Born in Switzerland in 1741, Kaufman was the only daughter of a painter. And that was really, really important to her and crucial for her development. Because actually, unless you were the daughter of a painter or somehow born into an artistic family, it was incredibly difficult to become an artist as a woman in 18th century Europe. The family didn't stay in Switzerland. In the 1750s, she and her father moved to Italy and it was here that she studied the great works of Renaissance and classical art with her father, who really taught her how to paint. Her talents were very quickly appreciated. So at the age of just 23, she was accepted into the Accademia di San Luca, the Artists' Academy in Rome. And in 1766, when she's just 25, she moved to London. And here she found a huge celebrity. And in fact, just two years after she arrives in 1768, when the Royal Academy of Arts is founded here in London, Kaufman is one of only two founding female members. Famously, when Zoffany paints the academicians of the Royal Academy, he paints this glorious scene with all these male academy members gathered around and there's models and it's a studio and everyone's working. But Kaufman and Mary Moser, the other female member, they're depicted in portraits on the wall because they can't be there in the room. Kaufman spent 16 years here in London. But in 1782, she returned to Rome and it was really there that she spent the rest of her career. She was an exceptionally well-connected woman. The poet Herder actually described her as possibly the most cultured woman in Europe. And so we are absolutely thrilled to have welcomed this painting, the first history painting in oils by Kaufman in a UK public collection, recently here at the National Gallery. We tell here the story of Western painting and I think it's so appropriate that she's now here in London, in Trafalgar Square, at the heart of the city, in which she spent so many years and in which she really made her international reputation. If you'd like to learn more about art, click here or here and subscribe to our channel. Thank you for watching and we'll see you next time.