Page:Women in the Fine Arts From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentiet.djvu/275

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WOMEN IN THE FINE ARTS


gentle womanliness. Just before she died she desired to hear one of Gellert's spiritual odes.

She was buried in Sant' Andrea dei Frati, beside her husband. All the members of the Academy of St. Luke attended her obsequies, and her latest pictures were borne in the funeral procession. Her bust was placed in the Pantheon, and every proper tribute and honor were paid to her memory in Rome, where she was sincerely mourned.

Although Angelica lived and worked so long in London and was one of the thirty-six original members of the Royal Academy, I do not think her best pictures are in the public galleries there. Of course many of the portraits painted in London are in private collections. Her pictures are seen in all the important galleries of Europe. Her etchings, executed with grace and spirit, are much esteemed and sell for large prices. Engravings after her works by Bartolozzi are most attractive; numerous as they were, good prints of them are now rare and costly.

She painted several portraits of herself; one is in the National Portrait Gallery, London, one at Munich, and a third in the Uffizi, Florence. The last is near that of Madame Le Brun, and the contrast between the two is striking. Angelica is still young, but the expression of her face is so grave as to be almost melancholy; she is sitting on a stone in the midst of a lonely landscape; she has a portfolio in one hand and a pencil in the other, and so unstudied is her pose, and so lacking in any attempt to look her best, that one feels that she is entirely absorbed in her work. The Frenchwoman could not forget to be