Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun

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.