Three singers

Three Singers from 1795, now in the Bündner Kunstmuseum, depicts musical performance — a subject particularly close to Kauffmann's own experience as a trained soprano who had considered a musical career before dedicating herself to painting. She was genuinely accomplished as a musician, having performed in public in her youth, and her music-making scenes reflect this personal engagement with artistic performance as a subject. The Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, holds this work as part of a collection with natural connections to Kauffmann, who was Swiss by birth and maintained connections to her homeland throughout her career in Rome. The 1795 date places this in her mature Roman period, when the Neoclassical circle she had been part of since the 1760s was giving way to the emerging Romanticism that would transform European art. Kauffmann's refined oil handling — cool clear colors, graceful figures, smooth controlled touch — was maintained consistently through this late period, and the Three Singers demonstrates her continued facility with multi-figure compositions at a time when her career was approaching its conclusion.

The group composition demonstrates Kauffmann's ability to arrange multiple figures in harmonious interaction, with the musical subject lending natural grace to the composition.