Francesca Whitlum-Cooper is a curator at the National Gallery where she is responsible for 17th- and 18th-century Italian, Spanish, and French paintings. She studied English at Cambridge and Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, before spending three years in Paris working on a PhD studying travelling eighteenth-century artists. As Fran Cooper she is the author of two novels, published by Hodder in the UK. Her debut, These Dividing Walls (2017) was an unexpected portrait of modern Paris drawn "with the precision of a painter" and was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award.