Her 1780–81 portrait of Harrop, in the neoclassical style, is one of my favorite pieces on view in the Museum because both Kauffman, a prodigious artist and a founding member of the Royal Academy, and Harrop, an opera singer who was one of the foremost interpreters of Handel’s music in her day, were independent women who achieved success in their own right.

In fact, this eighteenth-century portrait was an extraordinary achievement during a period that included relatively few women artists due to societal constraints that made it impossible for women to receive the same training as men.Īngelica became the focus of our inquiry and served as the impetus for a more exhaustive examination of the representation of women in the Museum. Of those ten pieces, only one is by a woman: Angelica Kauffman’s Portrait of Sarah Harrop (Mrs. As student guides, we are trained to present ten different objects throughout the galleries, from the Art of the Ancient Americas galleries to the Modern and Contemporary galleries, for a Highlights Tour. Having completed training to become a student tour guide at the Museum this past January, I was immediately curious about the question. Our conversation quickly sidetracked into a discussion about the representation of women artists in the Princeton University Art Museum.

In late March, while leading a discussion on the University’s new gender-neutral housing policy during a meeting of Princeton Students for Gender Equality (PSGE), the group, inclined to free-flowing discussion, became distracted by a question about the intersection of art, gender, and feminism.

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