In 1775 an artist named Nathaniel Hone submitted a painting called The Pictorial Conjuror, Displaying the Whole Art of Optical Deception (1775) to an upcoming exhibition at the British Royal Academy. The painting depicted in its top left corner an image of the Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman frolicking naked with other naked artists, among them her friend Joshua Reynolds, who is shown lewdly jabbing his oversized, trumpet-shaped hearing aid in the direction of Kauffman’s parted legs. Hone’s painting was understood by contemporaries to be an attack on Reynolds, the president of the Academy, a mockery of Reynolds’s rumored love affair with Kauffman, and an attempt to humiliate Kauffman herself by depicting her as a sexually domineering virago, wearing only knee-high black boots and brandishing a sword. But as Angela Rosenthal emphasizes in her gorgeously illustrated and well-researched book, Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility, Kauffman fought back—and triumphed. As one of only two founding female members of the Academy, Kauffman wrote a letter to its all-male board of directors demanding that Hone’s painting be removed from the exhibition. In her letter she politely but firmly reminded her colleagues of the “Respect to the sex which it is their glory to support,”...