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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. They were the Swiss history painter Angelica Kauffman and the French portraitist Elisabeth Vige?e Le Brun – no longer household names in the early twenty- first century but much-fe?ted celebrities in the late eighteenth. The two had much in common: both had been child prodigies; both were mbers of the prestigious Acadies of their respective countries; both had been celebrated court painters; both had made disastrous marriages that had drained th financially and made th the subject of scandal.pFranny 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 whose lives and creative careers straddled the political upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.pThe narrative framework of In the Shadow of the Pantheon will allow Franny to explore an age of political, aesthetic and social revolution via a webbrof connections that braces many of the most intriguing and powerful personalities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – to view a whole era of changing ideas and political ferment through the prism of the intertwined tales of two rarkable, rediscovered fale lives.p

In the Shadow of the Pantheon

  • By Franny Moyle

    From the author of The King’s Painter, a vivid life-and-times biography of two unjustly neglected women artists of the 19th century, Angelica Kauffman and Elisabeth Vige?e Le Brun.p
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  • Book Details

    Publication date: June 2025lFormat: 234 x 153mm IExtent: 448
  • 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; and The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde.p

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