This recently rediscovered picture is a bozzetto for a portrait of the Coutts sisters by Angelica Kauffman, painted during their Grand Tour through Italy in 1790-91. The three sisters were daughters of Thomas Coutts (1735 – 1822), director of the prominent London banking house Coutts & Co., and his wife, Susan Starkie (c. 1733 – 1815), who commissioned the work during their time in Rome.

Seated on the left is Frances (‘Fanny’, c. 1773 – 1832), resting her right arm on a lyre. In 1800, she married John Stuart, the 1st Marquess of Bute and son of Lady Bute, née Wortley Montagu. In the centre is Sophia (1775 – 1844), who became Lady Burdett upon her marriage to Sir Francis Burdett, 5th Bt, in 1793. Finally, on the right is Susan (1771 – 1837), who married George Augustus North, 3rd Earl of Guildford, in 1789, becoming the Countess of Guildford.

The Coutts family had been staying in Rome from January to March 1790, during which time our sketch must have been executed, presumably for the purpose of agreeing the composition with the commissioners as well as serving as a pictorial guide for the full-size work. The finished oil was painted in Rome and was completed in January 1791, many months after the Coutts family had left Italy. Indeed, Kauffman likely did not start painting until the family had departed Rome, explaining in a letter to Sir William Hamilton dated May 1790 that she was ‘painting the heads of the Miss Coutts’ Baumgärtel, 1990). Baumgärtel points out that in Kauffman’s Memoria delle Pitture, she records having received payment and shipping the completed work to Coutts in June 1791.

The setting of the finished painting and our sketch is the park of the Villa Borghese, Rome, with the man-made lake and temple of Asclepius visible in the background. This temple was constructed between 1785-92 and, although it was not actually complete at the time of painting, it must have been one of the Borghese Garden’s main attractions for grand tourists. The figure group is watched over by the sculpture of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and defender of the arts.

The beauty of the bozzetto lies in its immediacy and freedom. Baumgärtel concurs; when speaking of our work, she points out that ‘oil sketches count among the finest testimonies to Kauffman’s hand as these are the works that reveal her virtuoso style of painting almost immediately’ (Baumgärtel, report on our picture, Jan, 2026). Kauffman’s lively artistic process is evident in brisk, bright brushstrokes, such as the yellowish paint used to depict a sunlit patch of grass in the lower left and the mellow sunset behind. Whilst some passages are rapidly executed, such as the mask-like modelling of the faces and the frequent use of a dry brush in the figures’ drapery, other areas demonstrate a more polished technique. This is particularly evident where Kauffman allows the paper’s light ground to show through portions of the girls’ dresses, giving the effect of flesh seen through semi-translucent fabric. We can also see the graphite marks of the artist’s underdrawing in the lighter areas of the picture. Finally, Kauffman took the time, even at this early stage, to include many fine details such as the delicate flowers in the foreground and garland, and the two swans swimming in the lake behind.

Unlike the final painting, in which the sisters are portrayed as the Three Graces, this bozzetto reflects an earlier concept and depicts the Coutts sisters as the Three Muses. Frances, with her lyre, evokes the Muse of Music; Sophia, with a scroll resting in her lap (an element absent from the final portrait), suggests the Muse of Poetry. Kauffman makes other subtle compositional changes in the final picture: the bust of Minerva is raised, and red drapery is added to the sisters’ rocky seat. In our sketch, Susan is shown garlanding not her sister, as in the finished composition, but the bust of Minerva, symbolising wisdom, the arts, and the sciences. To correspond with the picture’s theme, all three siblings are dressed in antique Roman-style garb. Although these gowns are an artistic conceit, antique styles heavily influenced the fashion of the 1790s, most notably in the form of the neo-classical ‘empire line’ dress, whose form was not far removed from the Coutts’ painted costumes.

This commission is one of several historical or allegorical portraits painted by the artist. The blending of allegory with portraiture was seen to elevate the genre into the realm of history painting, then accepted as the pinnacle of artistic ambition. This tendency to intellectualise portraiture was prominently theorised by the Royal Academy’s first President, Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose teachings and his close friendship with Kauffman during her London sojourn certainly guided her artistic principles.

Dickinson recently sold a Rome period Kauffman portrait of anther English sitter depicted as a muse, whose pose, Roman dress and lyre all closely compare to the Coutts picture. It is hardly surprising that patrons who wished to display their erudition came to Kauffman to paint them in an allegorical guise; Kauffman was known throughout Europe as one of the most culturally accomplished women of her generation. Not only was she a renowned linguist, musician, and of course, portraitist, but she was also a great history painter in a time practitioners of that genre were almost exclusively male.

Kauffman was one of the only female painters of her generation to receive public commissions in Britain, and it was for these high-profile historical, allegorical or literary works that she would typically produce a bozzetto. Good examples of these are the sketch in the Victoria and Albert museum for the Two Gentlemen of Verona picture commissioned for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, and her grisaille studies for the roundels painted for the ceiling of the Royal Academy at Somerset House, of which she was a founding member.

Oil sketches for Kauffman’s portrait commissions are extremely rare. No such works have come to the market in recent decades, and our picture, itself only recognised once again in 2025 as being the work of Angelica Kauffman, is likely to be one of only very few she made. That Kauffman went to such lengths to produce a compositional oil sketch is a testament to the ambition, complexity and scale of the commission. In many ways, the finished painting is as much an allegory as a portrait and therefore, in Kauffman’s eyes, it presumably demanded the same preparatory treatment as her pure history paintings.

We are grateful to Dr Bettina Baumgärtel for confirming the attribution to Angelica Kauffman (report, 19 Jan. 2026) and for her assistance in cataloguing this picture.