Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun - by Franny Moyle (Hardcover)

About the Book

From the acclaimed author of The King's Painter, a vivid life-and-times biography of two unjustly neglected women artists, Angelica Kauffman and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

Book Synopsis

In the spring of 1790 two of the most gifted artists in Europe met in Rome and became fast friends, sharing their views on art, visiting the city's ancient sites and making trips to the opera together over several happy weeks. The Swiss history painter Angelica Kauffman and the French portraitist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun are no longer household names in the early twenty-first century but were much-fêted celebrities in the late eighteenth.

The two had much in common: both had been child prodigies; both were members of the prestigious Academies of their respective countries; both had been celebrated court painters; both had made disastrous marriages that had drained them financially and made them the subject of scandal; and both enjoyed careers that straddled the political upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Franny Moyle uses their meeting in the Eternal City as the point of departure for a 'life and times' biography of two brilliant but neglected women artists, amplified by more than one hundred stunning colour images of their work.

Review Quotes

"Praise for Franny Moyle:
Wolf Hall but with pics... This is a great thrusting cod piece of a book. It is big, bombastic and richly brocaded... I take my feathered cap off to Moyle and her publishers. This is a triumph of book-making as well as biography. This sumptuous book is a jewel in its own right." --Laura Freeman, The Times

"Evokes the painter and his world as vividly as a Holbein masterpiece. Beautifully written and illustrated, this book is a must for lovers of Tudor history." --Tracy Borman

"Full of insight... This is a gorgeous book, to which I am sure I shall return again and again." --Dan Jones

"One of the great strengths of Moyle's book is that it allows you to view Holbein's enormous versatility. Ambitious [and] sumptuously illustrated." --Spectator

About the Author

Franny Moyle is an author, art historian, television producer, contributor, lecturer curator and consultant. Her biography of Hans Holbein, the critically acclaimed The King's Painter was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her other books include: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of JMW Turner; Desperate Romantics a serial biography of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which was adapted into a six part drama for BBC 2 television, and The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, also selected as Book of the Week on Radio 4.