The National Gallery has been gifted a Greek mythology picture by the 18th-century artist Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807), her first history painting in oils in a UK national collection.
Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes is part of a gift to the Gallery from Richard and Luba Barrett of three pictures by important Swiss artists. With a startling portrait by Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) and a landscape by Alexandre Calame (1810–64), these works go on display from today, 2 July 2026.
Richard and Luba Barrett are Dallas-based collectors who have specialised in Swiss art from the 15th to the early 20th centuries.
Kauffmann’s painting is the first to enter the National Gallery’s current collection. A picture by the artist was bequeathed to the Gallery in 1835 but was then transferred to the National Gallery of British Art, Millbank, now Tate Britain, founded in 1897. From there it was lent to the Guildhall, Plymouth, where it is believed to have been destroyed in the Plymouth Blitz in 1941. 'Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes' is the first work by Kauffmann since then to join the National Gallery’s collection at Trafalgar Square.
Produced in 1787 to 1778, at the height of her success in Europe, this unusually large and fully worked preparatory picture is for a final painting commissioned by Catherine the Great that is now at the Scientific-Research Museum of the Academy of Arts of Russia, in St Petersburg.
The main subject is Achilles, whose death in the Trojan War had been prophesied. His mother Thetis wanted to protect him from his fate and, dressing him as a girl, she asked King Lycomedes to let him join the ladies at court as a ‘sister of Achilles’. When Ulysses and Diomedes bring gifts of clothes, jewellery and weapons to the court, Achilles gives himself away when he seizes the weapons.
Kauffmann had enjoyed a successful career in London, where she was one of only two female painters to be founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, before going on to Rome where she would paint this picture.
The picture is part of a gift of three paintings from the Barrett Collection that also includes Portrait of Louis Montchal, the first portrait by the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) to enter the National Gallery Collection. Hodler was the leading modernist Swiss painter in the decades around 1900. This painting joins his remarkable landscape 'The Kien Valley with the Bluemlisalp in the Distance' of 1902 which the Gallery acquired in January 2022.
One of Hodler’s most vivid and engaging small-scale works, it depicts librarian, writer and editor Louis Montchal (1853–1927). Silhouetted against a dark background, Montchal is captured turning a quick and quizzical gaze to the artist, eyes darting to the left. His dramatic, choreographed pose conveys a strong psychological presence.
From 1885 both artist and sitter were part of the Revue de Genève circle, whose members met every Thursday evening in Hodler’s studio, in emulation of Parisian salons. The ideas exchanged there, highly influenced by Symbolist art and poetry, not least Verlaine and Mallarmé, lay the groundwork for a distinctive Genevan avant-garde with Hodler at its heart. Writing in 1896, Montchal said of his artist friend that he was ‘ 'le plus entêté des martyres de l’Art’.' (‘The most headstrong - or stubborn - of martyrs for Art’.)
The Barrett Collection has also given the Gallery Four Large Trees, (before 1850) by the Swiss landscape painter Alexandre Calame (1810–1864.) From humble beginnings, Calame rose to become one of the foremost Swiss landscape painters of the 19th century.
Making tree studies was embedded in plein-air practice established in the 18th century. Within academic training the study of trees was considered the equivalent of working from the life model, and making a tree portrait formed the second task in the Prix de Rome landscape competition. Over a period of six days, confined to a cubicle, a student was required to paint a tree set against the sky, of a species set on the first morning. From the 1830s Calame made studies, in pencil and oil, of both groups of trees and single specimens.
In this new acquisition Four Large Trees a line of trees progresses obliquely into the landscape. Each trunk is a solid entity, emphatically placed, establishing a rhythm across the picture surface. The landscape is flat and open, green grass grows to the left, there are misty mountains in the background, and what may be an unseen lake in the middle ground. A pool of sunlight illuminates the ground, with patches of light catching the branches.
The National Gallery has the largest holding of paintings by Calame in Great Britain and 'Four Large Trees' joins its collection of three other paintings by the artist, 'The Lake of Thun' (1854), 'At Handeck' (around 1860) and 'Chalets at Rigi' (1861).
Sir Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, says: ‘We are very grateful to Richard and Luba Barrett for this generous gift of three outstanding pictures by Swiss artists from the 18th and 19th centuries. As well as a striking portrait by Hodler and a fine landscape by Calame we have been given the first work by Angelica Kauffmann to enter the National Gallery’s current collection.’
The three works acquired through the gift of the Barrett Collection are on display from 2 July 2026. Angelica Kauffmann’s 'Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes' can be seen in Room 37, Ferdinand Hodler’s 'Portrait of Louis Montchal' in Room 44 and Alexandre Calame’s 'Four Large Trees' in Room 39.
