Angelica Kauffman was adept with a glass harmonica. Visiting her London studio in 1768, the Danish poet Helfrich Peter Sturz described her eliciting haunting chimes from a set of gradated glasses, with ‘her large expressive eyes devoutly cast upwards’. She also played the cittern and delighted guests with poetry recitations. All the while, those same guests might have been on their way in or out of a portrait sitting – in 1767, for example, Kauffman depicted the Duchess of Brunswick, in flowing classical drapery of sumptuous white and blue, holding her infant son. As Franny Moyle emphasises, Kauffman – born in Switzerland in 1741, but resident at various points in London, Ireland and Rome – was an international phenomenon: a portraitist, a major history painter and a founding member of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts, she was the most successful woman artist (if not the most successful artist) of her era. 

Or was she? Moyle’s ambitious book on Kauffman interweaves her story with that of the French painter Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who arguably has an equal claim to the title. Primarily a portraitist, Vigée Le Brun was fourteen years younger than Kauffman and came slightly later to international acclaim. Nevertheless, she went from child prodigy to official painter to Marie Antoinette, whom she famously depicted in a chemise – a portrait so scandalous that its exhibition in 1783 may have contributed to the queen’s ultimate downfall. Forced to flee by the advancing revolution, Vigée Le Brun spent over a decade travelling Europe, visiting Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Russia. She was elected to art academies virtually everywhere she went and picked up commissions from the crowned heads of Europe, even meeting Angelica Kauffman in Rome in 1789. 

This is Moyle’s fourth art-historical book, and her second on the long 18th century (her book on Turner was published in 2016). She describes Kauffman and Vigée Le Brun as ‘two groundbreaking women who led exceptional lives in revolutionary times’. Although the primary link is her subjects’ gender, their lives, she argues, have ‘uncanny parallels’. Both were painters’ daughters, both lived and worked internationally and both made what appear to have been strategic marriages: Elisabeth Vigée, in 1776, to the art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun; Angelica Kauffman, in 1781, to the artist and family friend Antonio Zucchi. More substantially, both achieved material success, putting them on a near-equal footing with their male contemporaries. By the time Kauffman died in 1807, she had amassed more money than she could ever spend. In a self-portrait at the age of forty-five, Vigée Le Brun shows herself in luxurious black offsetting a cluster of jewels around her neck. 

From such giddy heights, these artists’ stars fell precipitously after their deaths, and Moyle’s meticulously researched book draws on primary sources as well as academic studies to make the case for their reintroduction to the popular canon. She throws herself passionately into this task, although the book as a whole often lacks clear narrative direction. Fortunately for Moyle, she is surely pushing at an open door, at least in respect of her stated ambition. In the last decade, there have been monographic exhibitions on both artists: for Vigée Le Brun at the Grand Palais in Paris, near her former mansion on the Rue de Cléry, in 2015 and for Kauffman at London’s Royal Academy in 2024. In this book, full-­colour, full-page illustrations immerse the reader in Kauffman’s lush neoclassicism and Vigée Le Brun’s bold coloration – the latter, Moyle suggests, amounting to a ‘unique synthesis’ between the new neoclassicism of the 1790s and the ailing Rococo movement that preceded it. 

Vigée Le Brun is perhaps the easier of the two to reclaim. Many of her portraits – such as her 1785 depiction of the Baronne de Crussol Florensac – have a directness and chromatic simplicity that are immediately appealing. She did, however, have a regrettably sweet tooth; only those similarly endowed will be able to stomach such gooey productions as her portrait of the blue-eyed dauphin with his dog Moufflet (c 1789). Kauffman’s art, on the other hand, is characterised by an often austere, always intelligent neoclassicism that draws – as Moyle argues convincingly – on the writings of the art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (one of her many illustrious friends). Although there is much in Kauffman’s life and work to admire, modern viewers are likely to struggle with the eyes-heavenward Penelope at Her Loom (1764) or the life-sized allegory of Religion Attended by the Virtues (c 1799–1801). The afterlife of the latter, gifted to the nation in 1819 and then mislaid in the early 20th century either by the Tate or the Plymouth Corporation (to whom it had been loaned), exemplifies the gulf between modern tastes and those of ‘the age of sensibility’, and may explain more fully than her gender why she has not retained her former status.

Nonetheless, many of the conditions peculiar to the art world of the late 18th century – the rise of reproductive prints, an expanding market for portraiture, the stirrings of ‘celebrity’ culture and a decline in traditional large-scale state patronage – probably contributed to these artists’ success. Moyle also speaks approvingly of a culture of ‘matronage’, particularly around Vigée Le Brun. ‘This kind of intimate portrait was more easily painted by a woman for a woman,’ she writes of her Fragonard-inspired portrait of the Duchesse de Chartres (1778) – although she understates the influence of similarly intimate portraits by other semi-outsiders, such as Fragonard himself and the pastelist Maurice Quentin de La Tour. 

Ultimately, for Moyle, it seems that the biggest factor in her subjects’ success was not just their skill but their ‘canny business instincts’ – Kauffman’s eye-catching abilities with the glass harmonica a case in point – and she perhaps aligns the emergent capitalism of the 18th century a little too easily with the digital economy of the 21st (she uses the noun ‘influencer’, and the verb ‘to innovate’). As it is, looking at Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s astonishing 1800 portrait of a black woman (reproduced as one of the book’s two ‘interludes’), I was left wondering whether history might have forgotten other – better – artists less able to lean in.