Franny Moyle

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. With vivid storytelling, one of the most gifted living writers of artistic biography, Franny Moyle, reclaims their legacies.

J M W Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life. Franny Moyle tells the story of the man who was considered visionary at best and ludicrous at worst, a near mythical figure in his own lifetime. A resolute adventurer, he found new ways of revealing Britain to the British, astounding his audience with his invention and intelligence.