Angelica Kauffman’s funeral in Rome in 1807 was designed by her friend Canova on the model of Raphael’s. The corpse of ‘the great Woman, the always illustrious holy and most pious… was accompanied to the Church by two very numerous Brotherhoods… followed by the rest of the Academicians & Virtuosi who carried in triumph two of her Pictures’. At the Royal Academy in London, the account of her obsequies was read out at the general assembly and entered in the minutes; as a founding member of the institution – one of only two women so honoured, with Mary Moser – Kauffman was gone, but not forgotten.

Kauffman was a decorative artist at heart. She was also a woman capable of falling for a conman

The Swiss-born daughter of a peripatetic Austrian artist, fluent in four languages, Kauffman was a self-proclaimed citizen of nowhere. In one respect, though, she was thoroughly Italian: she knew the value of ‘fare bella figura’. As a teenager with a fine singing voice, she could have made a career in opera but was advised against it by a priest and opted instead for art. By her mid-teens she was painting portraits of Italian bishops; by her twenties she had moved on to British grand tourists. Her success in this market persuaded her to try her luck in London, where she arrived in the spring of 1766, aged 24. By June of that year she had met and charmed Joshua Reynolds, ‘the first English painter’. By October he was calling her ‘Miss Angel’ and writing memos in his notebook to bring her flowers. He painted her portrait and she reciprocated with his, softening his features and taking years off his age. A year later, the Academy’s first president invited her to become a founding member.

As a neoclassical painter trained in Italy, Kauffman emulated the finish of Raphael; she lavished Vaseline on her lens, not least when painting herself. She used self-portraits like the Kardashians use selfies – no need for filters when she had a brush. In the 25 examples she painted over a 50-year career, she never looks a day over 20. The six in the Royal Academy’s new show include one in the all’antica dress of a Vestal Virgin, painted in her mid-forties to replace an earlier portrait in the Uffizi she thought ‘unworthy of myself’. It was hung next to Michelangelo’s (since reattributed to Jacopino del Conte).

The curators of this show, the first at the RA for 250 years, are determined that as a female artist, Kauffman should be judged on the merits of her art; they refuse to engage with the gossip that swirled around her and contributed largely to her celebrity. As an independent professional woman who put herself about, Kauffman set the 18th-century rumour mill whirring. Her name was inevitably linked with Reynolds’s; she was rumoured to have turned down Nathaniel Dance in the hopes of an offer from the more distinguished older artist. When that didn’t come, she secretly married a Count named Frederick de Horn who claimed to be a Swedish aristocrat but turned out to be a conman with at least one other wife. After he demanded money with threats, she paid him off then had to wait until his death, when she was pushing 40, to marry her second husband Antonio Zucchi. In the meantime, there was talk of an affair with Jean-Paul Marat while he was practising medicine in London; after her return to Rome in 1781 she became good friends with Goethe.

We’re not told any of this. The only whiff of scandal we’re allowed concerns Nathaniel Hone’s satirical painting ‘The Pictorial Conjuror’ (1775), which shows Kauffman as a young assistant at Reynolds’s knee and a distant dancing figure wearing nothing but black stockings. The furious letter Kauffman wrote demanding the painting’s withdrawal from the 1775 Academy exhibition is on display, though not the painting. Hone was obliged to repaint it, but the original composition survives in an oil sketch in the Tate. Including it in the exhibition might have added a much-needed pinch of spice to a worthy but insipid show.

‘Design’ from the Elements of Art, 1778-80, by Angelica Kauffman. © Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo: John Hammond

Despite her facility with a ‘penello volante’ (flying brush), Kauffman was no Artemisia Gentileschi. The female heroines of her neoclassical history paintings, with their Grecian profiles and soft pink arms tracing graceful gestures, are completely characterless. Where Gentileschi’s women have forearms clearly capable of separating an Assyrian general’s head from his body, Kauffman’s have no visible musculature; their facial muscles can have never pulled a face. Her Queen Eleanor supposedly sucking venom from King Edward I’s wound is too ladylike even to pucker her lips. The most successful works here are the two ceiling paintings of the Elements of Art (1778-80, see above) brought up from Burlington House’s entrance hall and the sweet little tondo of ‘Poor Maria’ (1777) from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. It’s no surprise that Kauffman’s designs were reproduced on porcelain, fans, and furniture; she was a decorative artist at heart. She was also a flesh-and-blood woman capable of falling for a conman. Was Miss Angel no better than she should be? I think we should be told.