Enfilade

From Bloomsbury Publishing:

Franny Moyle, Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun: The Extraordinary Entwined Lives of Two Eighteenth-Century Painters (London: Apollo, 2025), 496 pages, ISBN: 978-1801107440, $45.

In the late autumn of 1789, two of Europe’s most celebrated painters met in Rome. One, Angelica Kauffman, was a Swiss-born prodigy who had conquered the art scenes of London and Italy. The other, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, a Parisienne portraitist and favourite of the ancien regime, had just fled revolutionary France under threat of violence and scandal. Both were feted in their time, both were trailblazers in a male-dominated world—visionaries who helped define eighteenth-century art and feminism before the term existed.

This dual biography, framed within a thrilling story, restores these two extraordinary but unjustly overlooked figures to their rightful place in history. Set against a backdrop of revolution, empire and Enlightenment, it traces the dramatic lives and remarkable careers of Vigée Le Brun and Kauffman: artists who not only achieved unparalleled success and influence, but did so while pushing the boundaries of what women could be, both on canvas and in society. With vivid storytelling, one of the most gifted living writers of artistic biography, Franny Moyle, reclaims their legacies. She examines how each artist navigated fame, scandal and exile; explores the relationships between them and their peers; and considers how they were caught up in the huge cultural cross-currents that were reshaping Europe.

Through their work and their lives, they spoke boldly to the roles of women in public life, highlighted the prejudices and abuses suffered by their sex, reimagined and celebrated the female subject, and challenged the institutions that sought to contain them. Through them we encounter icons such as Marie Antoinette (whose portrait by Le Brun scandalised French society) and Catherine the Great, as well as cultural figures such as Emma Hamilton and Madame de Staël. The most notable men of their time—monarchs, statesman, aristocrats, artists, and more—are also woven into the fabric of the tale. Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun is a timely, revelatory history that not only brings two forgotten artists into view, but rethinks the story of European art itself.

Franny Moyle is a British television producer and author. Her first book Desperate Romantics was adapted into the BBC drama serial of the same title by screenwriter Peter Bowker. Her second book Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde was published in 2011 to critical acclaim. In 2016 she released The Extraordinary Life and Times of J.M.W Turner.

The life of Vigée Le Brun, as targeted to teenagers; from The Getty (for the context of the cover design, see Elisabeth Egan, “The Book Cover Trend You’re Seeing Everywhere,” The New York Times 21 June 2025) . . . 

Jordana Pomeroy, Daring: The Life and Art of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (Los Anges: Getty Publications, 2025), 112 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1947440104, $22.

The dramatic life story of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, one of the greatest portrait painters of all time.

Supremely talented and strategically charming, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) overcame tragedy and broke gender barriers to reach the height of success as a portrait painter, first in Paris, and then across Europe. After losing her father at age twelve and facing financial insecurity, she fought to gain access to artistic training and opportunity. She was pressured to marry at age twenty, to an art dealer who both helped and harmed her career. Vigée Le Brun deployed her intelligence and beauty to attract powerful clients, who relied on her to style the personal identities they projected to the world. Vigée Le Brun’s salons were the talk of Paris, and she became court painter to Marie Antoinette. Then came the French Revolution, when marginalized groups demanded change to centuries-old systems of oppression. Vigée Le Brun was forced to reexamine her alliances and run for her life, taking her young daughter but leaving her husband behind. Making her way through the countrysides and capitals of Europe and Russia—including a stay at the imperial court of Catherine the Great—the artist conquered fear and adversity to refashion her life and art. Ages thirteen and up.

Jordana Pomeroy is director and CEO of the Currier Museum of Art and former chief curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.