In 1767 Kauffman was seduced by an imposter going under the name Count Frederick de Horn, whom she married, but they were separated the following year. It was probably owing to Reynolds's good offices that she was among the signatories to the petition to the king for the establishment of the Royal Academy. In its first catalogue of 1769 she appears with "R.A." after her name (an honour she shared with one other woman, Mary Moser); and she contributed the "Interview of Hector and Andromache", and three other classical compositions. She spent several months in Ireland in 1771, as a guest of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and undertook a number of portrait commissions there. Her notable Irish portraits include those of Philip Tisdall, the Attorney General for Ireland, and his wife Mary, and of Henry Loftus, 1st Earl of Ely and his family, including his niece Dorothea Monroe, the most admired Irish beauty of her time. It appears that among her circle of friends was Jean-Paul Marat, then living in London and practising medicine, with whom she may have had an affair.