In the late winter of 1789  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.

Franny Moyle uses their meeting in the eternal city as the point of departure for a lavishly illustrated 'life and times' biography of two brilliant but neglected women artists whose lives and creative careers straddled the political upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun allows Moyle to explore an age of political, aesthetic and social revolution via a web of connections that embraces many of the most intriguing and powerful personalities of the time - to view a whole era of changing ideas and political ferment through the prism of the intertwined tales of two remarkable, rediscovered female lives.