Kauffmann was born in Switzerland but made her reputation in Italy and England, where she was a founding member of the Royal Academy. This painting and its pendant were executed in Rome for Monsignor Onorato Caetani, who in the same year had his portrait painted by Kauffmann. His later portraits by Mengs in 1779 and Batoni in 1782 attest to the tight-knit, international character of eighteenth-century Roman intellectual circles. Kauffmann’s subjects are taken from François Fénelon’s romance The Adventures of Telemachus, first published in 1699. In this painting, Calypso motions her nymphs to be silent when their songs about Telemachus’s father, Ulysses, cause him sorrow.
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