Measuring up to the Old Masters: An Arts Society Guernsey Lecture

Measuring up to the Old Masters – Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and Angelica Kauffman
Lecturer: Fanny Moyle

In this talk, Franny Moyle reveals how C18th painters Vigée Le Brun and Kauffman invite comparison with Old masters – as well as their male contemporaries – as part of a shared agenda to establish that female talent could match that of men. In an era when the differences of the sexes and their comparative abilities was much debated, women tended to be downgraded as painters, their efforts often diminished and dismissed without proper consideration.
In this lecture Moyle shows how the two most successful female painters of their era fought back against ingrained prejudice and deployed – quite independently of one another – a tactic of inviting comparison with Old Masters as a means of endorsing their talent. They also respectively engaged in a pictorial dialogue with their most successful male contemporaries as a means of reinforcing their claim to a seat in the cultural pantheon. Such sparing with the most successful male painters of the day reveals not only their respective confidence in their abilities, but interrogation of their work compared to their peers, suggests such confidence was far from misplaced.

Television producer turned author, lecturer and curator, Franny has been called “one of the most gifted living writers of artistic biography”.
In 2009, Desperate Romantics, her serial biography of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was dramatized for BBC2. She subsequently delivered acclaimed biographies of J M W Turner and Hans Holbein the Younger. Her Biography of Turner was described as ‘compelling’ by The Economist, ‘immaculate’ by The Times, and ‘ exemplary’ and ‘enthralling’ by The Sunday Times. Meanwhile, The King’s Painter – her account of the life and times of Holbein the Younger – was a Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2021.  In 2022 Between the Sheets, her revelatory exhibition of Turner’s erotica, drew national attention. Her account of eighteenth-century painters Angelica Kauffman and Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was published in 2025.
She is a trustee of Turner’s House in Twickenham, and a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.
She lives between Bristol, London and Nice, France.