In Our Time - Vigée Le Brun

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the French portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842). From her teens she delighted her high society subjects in and around Paris, notably Marie Antoinette who she painted around 30 times, and she invariably found ways to show her sitters at their best. Some critics were affronted that she, a young woman, dared paint at all and, when they saw how good her portraits were, some spread a rumour that surely this could not really be her work and she must have had a secret male lover finishing her portraits in a studio. The French Revolution forced Vigée Le Brun out of France and so she set off from one European court to another to find more success from Naples to Vienna to St Petersburg and to London, eventually settling back in France. Today her works are on show in major galleries around the world.WithRosalind Polly Blakesley Master of Pembroke College and Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of CambridgeRobert Wenley Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of BirminghamAnd Francesca Whitlum-Cooper Curator of Later Italian, Spanish and French Paintings at The National Gallery, London.Producer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer and Paul Lang (eds), Vigée Le Brun (exhibition catalogue in English, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016)Joseph Baillio et al., Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun: 1755-1842 (exhibition catalogue in French, Grand Palais, Paris, 2015/16)Rosalind P. Blakesley, Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great (Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2023), especially chapter 8 ‘The Triumphant Refugee’Lucy Davies, Vigée Le Brun: Self Portrait in a Straw Hat (National Gallery Global, 2025)Angelica Goodden, The Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1997)Franny Moyle, Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun: The Entwined Lives of Two Great Eighteenth-Century Women Artists (Apollo, 2025)Jordana Pomeroy, Daring: The Life and Art of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (Getty Publications, 2025)Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (University of Chicago Press, 1997)Paris Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 (Paul Mellon Centre, Yale University Press London, 2022)Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (trans. Sian Evans), The Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (Camden Press, 1989)Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Souvenirs de Madame Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (first published 1869; Tredition Classics, 2012)In Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. The portrait painter, Elizabeth Vigier-Lebvreau. Saint-Frin, 1555 to 1842, delighted her high-society subjects, showing them at their very best, notably Marie Antoinette, who she painted around 30 times. Some claimed Vigé Le Brin's paintings were so good only because a man must be finishing them for her, while some were affronted that she, a young woman, dared to paint at all.

Yet Vigé Le Brin was indomitable, journeying from one year. European Court to another after the French Revolution, and today her works are on show in major galleries around the world. With me to discuss Vigé Lebrun are Rosalind Polly Blakesley, Master of Pembroke College and Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge, Robert Wendley, Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham and Francesca Whitlam Cooper, curator of later Italian, Spanish and French paintings at the National Gallery in London.

Francesca Whitlam Cooper, can you give us a bit about Vigé Le Brin's background? Take us back to Paris in the second half of the 18th century. Absolutely. Well, she's born in the heart of Paris, really, a stone's throw from the Louvre, so very much in the centre of what was then the art world in Paris. She is born the daughter of an artist, a pastelist called Louis Vigier, who was celebrated for his portraits,

and particularly his portraits in the pastel medium, so as opposed to oil. These are very dazzling portraits that are being made with their coloured crayons, enormously popular in 18th century France. And I think that is probably the kind of thing that marks Vigé out that opens this art world to her, is her father and the access that she gets with that. So she writes very beautifully about her father and her memoirs. She's obviously very close with him. There's a sense in Ogini is he a very sociable, genial person. There's much description about the kind of soires, the family gatherings, the people he brings together, people from the art world, people from the world of finance or from music,

these very convivial gatherings, which are then going to be quite important for her and how she sort of establishes herself in Paris. But also just his passion for his arts is a lovely anecdote that he's all dressed up in his finery, ready to go out for dinner, pops back to the studio, puts his cap on to be able to make this small adjustment to a picture, and then without realising, you know, trots off to dinner, not wearing his wig, but wearing his cap. So her father is not a member of the Academy Royale, so the French Royal Academy,

but he is a member of the artist skilled in Paris, the Academy de Saint-Luc. She does get some education early on, although I think probably worth saying, on the one hand, amazing as a girl, that she did get education on the other, reading, writing, catechism, embroidery, domestic arts, not really the kind of education you'd imagine necessarily for a great artist. But that's sort of where she begins. That's where her story starts. So she is encouraged by her father.

But what opportunities are there for young women who have a talent for painting? Frankly, almost none. I mean, I think it is worth pointing out that if you're looking, not at women who paint, but women who are professional artists in the 17th and 18th century, almost without exception, they are the daughters of artists. And I think this is a question on a very, very practical level about access, that unless you are born into a family of artists, how would you have access either to the very stuff of picture making?

I mean, the literal tools of the trade, the materials you need to become an artist, but also to someone who's going to train you or encourage a talent. So almost without exception, every woman who is a successful artist in this period comes from a family of artists. I think that's probably especially important in France, where by the time Vijay is growing up, the Royal Academy is 100 years old. It's very formal.

It's very set in its ways. There's a very strict curriculum and process for becoming a professional artist. So if you were born male, you might train in an academy school. You might go to drawing sessions where you could copy from a male model. Well, absolutely not.

If you're a woman, that's an avenue that is completely closed to you. for all the young male artists, the great prize is the Prix de Rome, the Rome Prize, which every year sends the most talented students to the Academy's outpost in Rome, where suddenly the world of the classical past and the great masters of the Renaissance is all opened up to you, your page to go and live and study and paint. But again, I mean, it's an absolute non-starter if you're a woman. You know, it's an impossible set of circumstances.

Equally the great tragedy of her young life is that her father dies when she's still very young. So she's 12 when he dies unexpectedly following a surgery. And she has a complicated relationship with her mother. But I think to her mother's great credit, the mother and then the network of artists, the family friends who are around them, recognise that they have to keep nurturing Vijay's talent. So she is enrolled in quite a modest local drawing school,

run by the wife of a fan painter. She has the opportunity to study a little bit in the Louvre. She has people like Claudeauzef Farnet, who's the great landscape painter, encouraging her people. actually literally showing her how to lay out oil paints on a palette so that she has some chance of knowing how to work in the oil medium. So she starts her career at a relatively young age, but Polly Blakesley, how on earth does she become the portraitist for Marie Antoinette, her main portraitist? I think it starts at the point that she and her mother and her stepfather, who was not a man she got on well with,

moved into one of the hotel in Paris. They rented an apartment. And the main occupant of that hotel was her future husband, Mr Lebrun. And she at this point becomes acquainted with one of Paris's great art dealers, a real mover and shaker in the art scene. And she becomes acquainted with the sort of people he's hosting, as well as having met the people Francesca was describing. And she eventually marries him. It's not a thrillingly happy marriage. He uses her and he encourages her to paint, but he also uses her very much as a, you know, as a means of creating further income. She, of course, benefits from the contacts and the connections. So she becomes, you know, she does become part of the salon that they

together ran, which is a popular place to meet. And in some way, we're not completely sure. She's brought to the attention of Mary Antoinette. This is 1778. she's exactly the same age as Marie Antoinette. We can't know, but we might speculate that either courtiers or possibly Mary Antoinette's mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, felt that there could be a connection here of these two women mobilising and having to navigate a world

which was always going to be challenging to a certain extent. Just out of interest, how on earth did Marie-Therresia in far-off Vienna get to hear of somebody like Vigé, There would have been correspondence. So these courts and these cities, they're so well interconnected. And so the word of up-and-coming artists would spread quite well between correspondence, between visiting diplomats, whatever it was.

So she's invited to Versailles to paint Mary Antoinette, and she does a good job. I would say it's not a great job. It's not one of her great portraits, but she does a classic ceremonial court portrait where Marie Antoinette is in a beautiful dress with panniers to extend the dress out to the sides. The bit that makes you realise it's a relatively early work of this ilk in Vigilla Brun's career is that to the right of Marie Antoinette, there's an enormous great pedestal with a bust of Louis XVIth on it,

and the proportions aren't great. This bust sort of looms over the sitter, and later you would have a slightly more sort of felicitous arrangement. But she does well and it is approved of at court and it's sent to the mother to Maria Theresa in Vienna. And then further sort of copies and iterations are produced for other European courts. One goes as far as the US.

So this becomes a kind of calling card for her. Yes, one thing I noticed about the early portraits of Marie Antoinette is I thought I could still detect the Habsburg jaw and the droopy lip, which seemed to disappear a little over time. There's a little bit of editing that goes on over time and she becomes slightly less afflicted with that family trait. We don't go in for portraits nowadays quite so much, of course we photograph everything we see.

So why was the portrait so high stakes for both the sit-around-the-artist? Oh, it's so high-stakes because for Vigé LeBron, she's got to nail it. You know, this is her moment to show she can do the most prestigious, best-paid portraits for one of the greatest patrons there was at the time. The French royal family was, you know, you were landing a big fish if you were painting for them. For Marianne,ette, she's a young, foreign queen. There are lots of rumours beginning to circulate about her already. And every single time she's painted, she, as part of the sort of portrait.

contract, if you like. She's making a statement about who she is and the position she occupies whether she is deferring to her husband, whether she presents a threat. So getting that sort of balance between the kind of otter, the dignity, the majesty of a portrait of a queen, but at the same time this sense of her being, you know, she has to be maternal. She has to be very deferential to her husband. So getting that balance was a really tricky thing to achieve. Thank you, Polly. Robert Wendley, she painted women much more than she painted men. Why was that? I think because largely she was more sympathetic to women

and I think also they would naturally more likely gravitate to a female artist. Also, she was very adept at introducing fashion and conveying fashion. She was very fashionable herself. She liked to depict her female subjects in loose informal clothing, relatively speaking, to loosen up their bodies, as it were. And I think that's something that enabled them to be more expressive and her to capture that. But that's not to say that she wasn't successful with male portraits.

I think the ratio is about four to one, but there's some very successful male portraits such as Cologne in the Royal Collection, which is a magnificent painting one of her masterpieces. But she was chaperoned, right? Yes. Well, those men that she suspected were there partly, because she was very good looking

and they had maybe ulterior motives. There's an anecdote that she relays in her memoirs that if they gave her the glad eye, so to speak, she would paint them so that their eyes were looking into the far distance. That's how they were posed. And if she caught them glancing in her direction, taking away from the pose,

she would immediately say to them, I'm doing the eyes now. And they would have to snap back and not be ogling her. and her mother, as you say, was her chaperone, certainly in her early career, would be chucking away at this. She was making a successful living. Is that the case? How did the market work for her? Well, she was very successful. Unfortunately, in her early career, a lot of her money was siphoned off first by her stepfather and then by her husband, who running a business as he did in dealing with old master paintings was constantly needing money to buy to replenish his stock.

and so in that period a lot of her money she didn't retain but later on in her career certainly in the years you know the later 1780s and when she was travelling through Europe she was immensely successful she was able to get away with charging top prices wherever she went but she was so fashionable and so much in demand that she could do it and she became very wealthy indeed Francesca Whitlam cooper the National Gallery has a famous self-portrait of her in a straw hat. Can you tell us the story of that painting?

This is indeed known as the self-portrait in a straw hat, and the straw hat plays a very, very crucial role in the picture. So it's one of two versions of this self-portrait that are painted in 1782 on the back of a visit that Vigille Lebrun makes with her husband in 1781 to Brussels, and they also go to Amsterdam. But Brussels is the key place for that bit of the story, because at that point in Brussels, there are the sales of the collections of the the Prince of Loren. So he's died. His great artworks are coming up for sale. And obviously her husband is a picture dealer, as Robert said, is very interested in what he can go and see there. And we know that one of the pictures that they look at is a Rubin's portrait, today known to be

of his sister-in-law, Susanna London, today also in the National Gallery, which is very felicitous. And Vijay has long admired Rubens. She talks early on that, you know, Rubens is one of the people that she copies. But the picture in particular, the portrait of Susanna London, is not a known at the time as the Chapo de Pai or the Straw Hat. And it's a complete misnomer because if you look at this portrait, you'll see immediately. It's a very black felt hat. It's not a straw hat at all. Do we know at all why that happened? I think it's probably a sort of a slight mishearing of Chapo de Pais, which is straw or chaper de Poil, which is felt.

In the kind of, in the sort of 18th century French, it's thought to have been a mishearing. But it's regardless of what it looked like, it was called the Straw Hat picture. And the hat's importance to that Rubin's picture is that it casts the, the most incredible shadow over the sitter's face. This is this really beautiful, complex light effect. And having seen that in Brussels at this very, very famous sale, it was a very well-known painting. She knew about it even before she'd gone and seen it in person.

Vigilla Brand paints the self-portrait in which she places herself in a straw hat. And for me, I think there's several things that make this a really extraordinary thing to do. First is that she shows herself not only in the beautiful straw hat with an ostrich feather and wildflowers, in a very beautiful silk dress, but also crucially holding her palette.

So it is a self-portrait of her as a painter, very, very much advertising her profession. The second is that, you know, she's situating herself in a kind of old master context here. She's very explicitly quoting Rubens, anyone looking at the portrait in that time, that Rubens was so famous, they would have known that's what she's referring to. But she's not only quoting Rubin's actually, I think she's correcting the mistake because hers is a very beautiful straw hat. It's the sort of centre of the picture. You can't possibly avoid it.

And she, too, you know, absolutely nails these incredible light effects over the face. You've got her beautiful decoletage. Again, this palette. So the whole thing, I think, is this very complex manifestation, if you will, of her identity, not only as an artist, not only as a woman, but also as someone who can equal and indeed maybe outdo the old masters. And I went to see the portrait in the National Gallery and the two, the Rubens and the Vigé Lebrun are more or less next.

to each other. So you can compare. You can. You can compare and contrast and see which you prefer. Polly Blakesley, she built up this very successful career in Paris with the collaboration to some extent of Mary Antoinette. And then, of course, in a blink of an eye, it's over. The French Revolution happens. What does she do? How does she survive and thrive? It's such a dramatic moment. Well, initially, she takes refuge with family and friends. She sort of goes into hiding in Paris. And then at the moment that the mobs are gathering to force the royal family back into Paris from Versailles, she leaves. She gets into a carriage with her

very young daughter and the governess, and off they go. They just leave. And I do think it's a moment to sort of pause on. There she is this celebrated, established woman artist, woman artist, against all the odds. And as you say, blink of an eye, she's got to move on. I think she's so strategic is the word that always echoes in my head. So she goes to the places where she knows other French emigres are going, but also where there are academies, where there are connections, where there are royal connections. So she goes to Bologna, she goes to Rome. She kind of gathers up associations with academies and awards as she travels.

And she ends up at the court of Naples and Sicily, where the beloved older sister of Marie Antoinette is queen. and she becomes a very important sort of facilitator and patron. And it's while she's in Naples that she begins to meet and paint people who prove very important to her in her further steps. So she's eventually to move on to Vienna and St. Petersburg. But first, she very much wants to go back to Paris in 1792. And she thinks that's sort of on the cards. But then the French monarchy balls.

That's not the year to return. Yeah, that was the wrong call. Thankfully, she didn't actually get there. So at this point, she moves on to Vienna. And in Vienna, she's commanding such prices that the French emigres, who for a while were part of her coterie, they were people she might gravitate towards, they can't afford her anymore because they're broke

because they've had to leave France and leave all their belongings. And it's in Vienna that she meets the Russian ambassador, Count André Razum. The man who later in 1806 commissions from Beethoven, the Razumovsky Quotets. So a very cultured, flamboyant person who loved hosting a great soiree and a great party. And through him, she becomes really well acquainted with some of these sort of preposterously wealthy Russians who are moving around various different. Proposterously wealthy Russians, surely not. A lot of them around in those days.

So Vienna, of course, was a very lively place. at the time, but we'll come on to St. Petersburg. Robert Wendley, let's go back to Naples, because there she meets Emma Hamilton. Well, that's an interesting episode and relationship. So born Amy Lyne, actually, in the Wirral. She adopted various names, but eventually called herself Emma Hart and came to the attention of the youngest son of the Earl of Warwick,

who took her on as his mistress. and in that circle she then started sort of posing for artists, notably Romney, and she's particularly notable for her looks. She was just very beautiful, but had what was seen at the time sort of Grecian features, antique Grecian features. And she would dress up in antique clothing, or as understood at the time, and adopt these poses or attitudes like tableau vivant. Eventually, Lord Greville got tired of her, we told,

and passed her on, charmingly, to. his uncle, who was Sir William Hamilton in Naples. And she was by this time, she was very noted throughout Europe. Gerta, for instance, had seen her attitudes and praised them. So she was seen as this sort of living representation of ancient Greek art. And was Vigé LeBron able to experiment with that, as it were? The portraits she made of her, and there are three principal ones and some sort of variance of them, she would regard them not as portraits but as history paintings

because although they have her facial features she's posed in allegorical guise so as a peccante or as Ariadne or in other cases as the Khomey and Sybil so she's in these historical and mythological guises and I think that reflects partly how Viseille LeBrand understood her status she wasn't one of the high society she was a mistress so she was depicted

and considered in a slight different way But they're very effective paintings and she was very proud of particularly Emma as a civil and she actually retained this painting the prime version of it and took it with her on her travels and it had notoriety of its own and attracted people to her.

So Francesca, what was it that people were expecting when they commissioned Vigé la Brin to paint them? What could she do for you that other portraitists wouldn't? I think what people are seeking if they're commissioning Vigé LeBrand to paint their portrait,

is a sort of posed informality, if you will. I think there is something that she brings to the portrait that is lively, and we have, you know, descriptions at the time when the portraits are shown at the salons, for example, in Paris, you know, the salon exhibitions, that she has this incredible ability to get a sense of people's character or the kind of vivacity of the sitters. You know, I think today, you know, we think of her portraits

as being very flattering, very elegant, and I think there's always this sort of sense of a sort of, negative cadence there, but actually, you know, even if you were the very wealthiest person in 18th century Europe, how many times, unless you're Marri Antoinette, how many times are you going to be painted in a portrait in your life? I mean, maybe half a dozen at the most. So, sort of, why would you not want to be shown in your best light? And I think that's what Vige brings. You know, in a VJ portrait that, you know, it's not going to be rigid. It's not going to be sort of fixed. There'll be a sort of fluttering of the draperies. There'll be a sense, you know,

in your face as well as the sitter of the kind of liveliness of your character. Yes, looking at all her work, she manages to convey an emotion each time. And it struck me as rather modern and rather daring and actually rather forward-looking. I think it is. And I think it's quite difficult for us. Obviously, we live in a photographic world and, you know, we know everything that comes after. But actually, it's not true, but there is this idea that Vigé Lebrun is the inventor of the smile in portraiture. It's absolutely, I mean, there's a preposterous claim.

and it's not true. But it is true that if you were to be wandering or wandering through a picture gallery of this era looking around, one of the ways in which you can identify a VJ portrait is actually, you know, that has sitters do often have this kind of half smile. It's one of the first times really that you consistently see someone painting teeth.

I know that sounds bonkers. But it's true and I think it's about this kind of studied informality. They're not casual because obviously portraits take so long to paint and they're such expensive things and they are still very, very much luxury objects. But I think there is something that she is bringing in this, whether it's her relationship with the sitter or the kind of rapport they can establish or even a sort of movement in the composition that people have really drawn to, kind of understandably.

Polly, we got to Vienna where she runs into a lot of Russian oligarchs or princes or whatever they were at the time, and she decides to go off to St. Petersburg. What happens in St. Petersburg? In St. Petersburg. So she undertakes this extraordinary journey over several months. You know, she is so intrepid, this woman, whatever else you say. about her. She is, you know, she is no shrinking violet. She will head out there. So she goes off through Lithuania. She goes through Corland, up the coast of Estonia. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful journey. And she gets to St. Petersburg, according to her memoirs, and we may come back to those

because they are not reliable, but according to her memoirs, she meets Catherine the Great within a couple of days, and there's a very courteous exchange, and the Empress is very flattering to her. and she lands this great commission which is to portray two of Catherine's granddaughters so the older two daughters of Paul, Catherine the Great's son. And she produces a portrait and she's very pleased with it but things don't go that well

because the empress really takes against it. And she says of this portrait, she says, my two granddaughters look like two pug dogs basking in the sun in one of her letters. And in another one she says they're like monkeys grimacing. And she says people don't know. know which one's the older and which one's the younger. Do you think there was a fair criticism?

Well, the thing is we don't have the first painting, but therein lies a tale because Vige in her memoirs, A, she claims that this isn't the Empress's response at all. It's actually that of her latest lover, a man called Platon Zubov, and she says it's all his fault. He didn't like it. And actually the Empress really did like it. But we know from letters to, for example, Baron von Grimm,

that the Empress really did take against it. So she was asked to repaint it. And in her memoir, she implies that it was just, you know, a little bit of an adjustment and adding some sleeves. She'd portrayed them initially in tunics and she gives them lovely long sleeves that then the Empress is satisfied. But actually, X-ray show that there are no changes to the painting as it survives. So she did paint it afresh.

And that was the sort of thing you didn't want to get out there. So she managed not, you know, she managed to sort of quash that story by pretending she just had to, you know, just a couple of small pentamenti and all was well. But despite having irritated the Empress, it doesn't appear to have damaged her reputation in St. Petersburg. She stays for a while, doesn't she? She stays for six years. She does incredibly well. And she, very soon after the slightly ill-fated portrait of these young granddaughters,

she portrays the wife of Catherine the Great's grandson, oldest grandson, a woman called Grand Duchess Elizabetha Alexevna and this is another huge great state portrait that is superb. I was a bit disobliging of one of the early ones of Marie Antoinette. This one is absolutely fabulous. And that is well received by the Empress and they meet in the Winter Palace for the Empress to have a look at it and give her verdict and the verdict is given.

And again in Vige's memoirs she says that in that meeting Catherine was so impressed by it that slightly grudgingly she says, everybody is saying that you should paint my portrait. I will sit for you. Let's turn to that quite soon. But just a few days later, the Empress dies of almost suddenly a stroke. So that portrait never came about. Again, because we can't rely on the memoirs,

it may be that that was a very convenient fiction. But coming back to a sort of more positive way of thinking about Vijay, what she managed consummately well was to stay in favour in the viper's nest that could be the Russian court. Robert Wenley, while she was in Russia, Vige painted Countess Galavina, and that painting hangs at the Barber Institute where you are presently employed. What does that tell us about her skills, that portrait? Which again, looking at it, there's something very compelling. about her expression.

Yes, it's a much-love painting in the barber. I think many people would say it's their favorite painting of our collection. And it's certainly one of her most successful paintings made while she was in Russia. I think there's no doubt about that. It's a very engaging painting, above all. The way that Golovina is posed, she's looking at you straight on, and you can't really escape her brown eyes. They just bore into you.

She also holds around her body tightly. a bright red wrap, scarlet wrap, which is probably a studio prop, but it's done in a way that evokes, again, paintings by Rubens and Tishin. So she's evoking the old masters. It's slightly sort of erotic, I suppose, in the pose, in the way that the body's so tightly wrapped like that. But it's above all the expression that captivates you. The head is, and the figure is against a very spare background,

kind of monochrome background, but just a diagonal streak of light. So it's really much the head and the pose that really engages you. And I think this is an example of where she's really responding with warmth to the sitter. And where we know from her memoirs that she really, we know that she really appreciated the sitter on a personal level and engaged with them, I think that really comes out in the paintings. And we know from her own memoirs, and this is also backed up by Golavena's own memoirs, that they had a very close relationship, that Vigé LeBron appreciates. Gola Vina's wit, her musical ability. She apparently composed and sang love songs and also a talented drawing. And up on all the latest literature from Paris, it's a great masterpiece.

Thank you, Robert. Francesca, what is it that is enduring about Vigé? I think there are a few things. I mean, I think one, inevitably, you know, she is an artist, as all artists are painting in their time and their moment. And I think the nature of who she's painting and the moment in which she's working means that she does give us this extraordinary glimpse,

certainly in the French context of the last gasp of the Ancien regime, if you will. You know, we just see these incredible likenesses of all these characters who go on many of them to have untimely deaths or long periods as emigres and everything else. So I think there is this sense that, you know, she kind of captures Europe at this particular moment or whether it's, you know, with Emma Hamilton in Naples or other people across the courts

that she travels to. For me, maybe the slight injustice that we do with Vijay is because these are very dazzling portraits and they're very engaging at a kind of surface level. I mean, literally her painted surfaces, she's fabulous at painting fabrics. She really does paint these beautiful complexions,

these very engaging sitters. I think there's been a tendency to look at her or treat her as if everything is just surface, whereas in fact, I do think this is an artist who's thinking very carefully about what her legacy will be and positioning herself in the sort of

continuum in the canon, if you will, of the old masters. So we know that she copies old master paintings early on in her career. We know before she marries the art dealer Lebrun, you know, he's lending her works, you know, even as they're living in the same house for her to copy. You know, the entrance into the academy is so important to her. It means so much to her that she would be able to do that, you know, and actually when it happens in the end, it's done on order of the king and, you know, she's sort of slightly disparaged for it. But throughout her career, throughout her compositions, we see this kind of engagement with old master painting that I think, I do think that is actually something of hers that endures. I think there is a way of seeing her in this

context where she is taking herself very, very seriously and maybe asking us to do the same. Polly, you wanted to come in there. I mean, I couldn't agree more. And I really enforce the idea there is an intellectualism to her thinking and to her planning of her portraits. And Robert talked about the portraits of Emma Hamilton. You know, it's not serendipitous that they're coming out the way they are and are can be very compellingly positioned as a sort of history painting portrait. She wanted to see herself as a history artist, but couldn't really penetrate that elite, as it were. But it's interesting when, so Francesca was talking about her admission to the French Academy, which as you say was slightly tainted because she was married to an art dealer. And academicians were never meant to be involved in the grubby matter of buying and selling art.

you know, perish the thought. And so even being married to an art dealer disqualified her from being elected to the academy and, you know, going back in her history, what we're doing here is that, so that Marie Antoinette asked Louis the 16th to intervene. And so in effect, it was by a royal fiat that she was admitted to the academy

and people held that against her as, you know, she's been, you know, she's got in through the back door. But when she was admitted as her presentation piece, she painted a history painting, which is a real statement of, you know, and I can do this. You might have seen my portraits of Mariantoinette or of all the other figures in Paris she was painting at that point.

And she also much later, and I don't think, I think these two things are connected. In 1800, she is admitted as what was called an honorary-free associate. So it's a very high, honorific position to the Russian Academy, the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. And for that, she describes, you know, beautiful, every moment of the admission ceremony. She describes walking into the hall. It's a room I've been in. The Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg is in the same building it was in when she was there.

And she describes walking up through sort of serried ranks of admirers to the president at that time, a man called Stroghanov. And she's just clearly really proud because here's her moment of doing it on her own merits without any intervention from anybody else. And it's sort of, this is mine, this is my achievement. Robert Wienle, what did Vige make of England? And what did England make of her? Yes, good question. So it's a little known fact that she actually visited England between 1803 and 1805 in a period when there was sort of peace

briefly between France and England, breaking the Napoleonic Wars. So she was able to come over and, as it were, try her luck with the English court and English society. It was a little bit of a disappointment in the sense that she didn't much like the weather in London. It was sort of damp and dirty, as she described it. The fact that no one did anything on a Sunday, she found a bit depressing. So those were some of the negatives. On the positive side, she loved getting out and about. She went to the sort of spa towns, Bath and Brighton and Tunbridge Wells over to the Isle of White. She again connected with the French emigre and the Russian

emigre community, such as it was. Wherever she went, she was trying to recreate those golden years at the end of the Enchant regime, always trying to go back to that golden age for her. She did meet sympathetic people. There was a Mrs. Chinnery. She was a sort of patron of the arts. And she managed to get a commission from the Prince of Wales, which was another big deal, the future George V. So she was maintaining her standards, even if she found the weather.

Yes. I mean, she didn't stay as long as she did in Russia, and she was partly constrained from leaving earlier because of resumption of hostilities between England and France. That's not to say that she didn't make some interesting portraits here and she still was able to command high prices and still met opposition from local artists. Francesco, about the local artists and other artists and critics

because she did incredibly well commercially, let's face it. But what did her fellow artists and what did the critics save her at the time? Maybe the best we can say is that she had a mixed critical reception. So, I mean, if you go back through the write-ups and the commentaries on the salon in Paris and the exhibitions there, both the salons like respondents, and then once she's become an academician, she's able to exhibit at the kind of the main academy salon as well. And it is really sort of a tale of two halves because on the one hand, you have these descriptions of these beautiful portraits. A large amount of these salon accounts is given over to Vigel LeBrand.

There's much discussion of what she's exhibiting. there are compliments about the vivacity of the sitters, the tush, you know, actually the way she has painted them, the flair that she brings to portraiture. And yet there is at the same time this very clear discomfort with whether it's the femininity of these portraits, whether it's the idea that they're more flattering than they are truthful, whether it's a sense that she's using her own femininity, that were she not a woman artist, would we be, even then they're saying, would we be, remarking on these in the same way if they weren't painted by woman. And in fact, there is this long-running rumour

which gets written about quite a bit that there's this poor heart-sick young artist who's so in love with her that actually he's not only just finishing her portraits, but actually maybe he's painting the whole thing secretly and the whole idea of Vigia Liberon is a kind of sham. And the idea that it's actually genuinely

easier for people in the French art world to believe that, to believe that the whole thing is a kind of an elaborate hoax rather than to kind of confront the realities of a young, attractive, very talented, very commercially successful portraitist. It's fascinating. Polly, she gets her own back when she writes her memoirs, but people don't really believe the memoirs, do they? Her memoirs. Her memoirs, her memoirs are enigmatic and confounding and a brilliant read, partly because she can be so waspish about people. I mean, she can just be so unkind. There's one woman she really has it in for, the Duchess de Mazurah, who is stout and ugly and, you know, lots of very, very sort of

unkind words. But the best bit is she describes a dinner party where the Duchess apparently decided it's a dinner party for 100 guests and the Duchess decides that she will have her cook serve an enormous pie in which there are a hundred tiny living birds. And with great, you know, sort of rigmarole, the pie is cut open. But all these birds fly up and they decide to settle in the hairdos of the guests, which are these, you know, vast, powdered wigs heading up skywards. It's a comic read at times. But the bit that becomes complicated is when, you know,

as an art historian or a cultural historian, you're trying to work out what relations might actually have been like. And one of the like motifs throughout the memoirs is she's ever demonstrating ways in which very high-placed patrons were incredibly kind to her because she was such a sort of deserving person. So early doors, she talks about missing a sitting with Mary Antoinette because she was heavily pregnant and going to apologise the next day and being so flustered that she drops her paints and that Mary Antoinette herself bends down to pick them up. And then much later in St. Petersburg, she talks about Grand Duchess Elizabeth Alecsevna,

who when Vijay felt faint, you know, brings her water and brings her around. And then in the least likely of many examples of this, there's a moment when Alexander I comes to the throne in Russia. And he apparently goes so far as to get off his horse in the street to greet her and say, you must do an equestrian portrait. Now, she's never done an equestrian portrait in her life. So the probability of this is really quite low. It's a complicated history if you're looking for a historical record.

Francesca, a brief comment from you on that. I don't disagree at all, Polly, with what you've said and about the unreliability of the memoirs. The only thing that it does in the context of talking about Vigé LeBron seem important to point out is that I think the unreliability of artists' memoirs is actually a trope of the genre itself. And I think I do feel that we maybe comment a little bit more on Vigier LeBron's unreliability more than we would say

the very, very many male artists who have these wonderful stories about being child prodigies and scribbling drawings everywhere and being picked up and young genius and these wonderful patrons who meet them in the street. It's not that I disagree with you at all, but I do think it's interesting that art historically critically, we all kind of hone in on it with Vijé Lebrun in a way that we perhaps don't. So true.

Robert, a final word from you. Her reputation today. It's interesting where we are with her, actually, because there have been very few exhibitions on her. There was one in 1982 and one in 2015, neither of which came to this country. I'm glad to say at the Barber we are doing one next year, 27 on her work that's in England and her connections with England.

But where she sits in the sort of feminist canon is a matter of some debate because she obviously was remarkably successful. She was in many ways exceptional, but she was also very much tied to the Enstrand regime, so that makes it difficult in a political sense. She was quite dismissive of less wealthy people. And as I've said earlier, she was always trying to go back, to heart back to that golden time as she saw it.

She was very much pro the Bourbonne dynasty. She didn't like Napoleon and all he stood for. So I think she's a complex character. She should be perhaps better known and more widely known in terms of her great masterpieces and the range of her work. It's not just female subjects. It's not just queens. There's amazing portraits of artists, of singers, not just aristocrats.

Francesca, her reputation? I think growing, I think we all. also have more work to do. I think actually the more work that is done, the more complexity comes out of Vigé Lebrun. And I think even if you're looking at her, you know, it's relatively recently the large group of pastels that she made, pastel landscapes were discovered that she made on her travels, you know, not the kind of flashy court portraits, but actually just, you know, a way of looking at someone who's introduced to art through this medium by her father and then, you know, 50 years later is still doing them on her travels in Switzerland. I think there's a lot more for us to

uncover and a lot more to take seriously. Polly, your verdict? She was competitive, she was audacious, she was fearless, she was self-assured, she absolutely deserves the rise in interest that is happening now. My thanks to Robert Wendley, Francesca Whitlam Cooper and Polly Blakesley, and also to producer Simon Tillotson, as it's his last time in this studio after 11 years as the great engine of In Our Time. next week it's seashells in the oceans and of course on the seashore.

Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. Good. So now what I wanted to know, which we didn't really touch on, and that is her personal relationships, and in particular with the daughter, The daughter, it seems to me, to have been a very, that's a very complicated relationship. Any of you got thoughts on that?

Well, obviously she was, Julie, the daughter was the subject of those maternal portraits. Beautiful portraits. Beautiful portraits. And she seems, we would take from those portraits certainly really doted on her in her early life. But then the relationship seems to deteriorated and quite dramatically. But she follows her around the European courts. Yes, so she joins her. Well, Julie marries the secretary to the director of the Imperial Theatre,

theatres in Russia. But it's a marriage that she doesn't approve of. This is Vigé LeBron. And things deteriorate from that point. And it's a rather sad ending to Julie's life. She ends up dying in poverty, even though her mother is one of the wealthiest people around. So there was clearly a big breakdown in their relationship, which he wouldn't guess

from those very early double portraits. I think in a way that sort of mirrored across her life. I mean, in a way, it's so unusual, actually, to come across someone in the 18th or early 19th century who lives to almost 87. But then you realize actually that, you know, in the 1810s, she loses her brother with whom she's been very close. You know, Julie dies, her husband. You know, obviously they do, they separate and there's a financial, you know, disentangling. But, you know, when she returns to France, she goes back to live in the Hotel Le Bonn with him. She loses all these people and then lives for another, you know, to 25 years. Is it true that the husband was a gambler?

Yes. So I think that the husband is, you know, a fantastic art dealer, also likes gambling, also likes prostitutes. And, you know, as you alluded to, Robert, you know, the nature of the art market is you need a lot of money to make a lot of money. And so having a wife who's commanding all these fantastic prices is very useful for kind of, the liquidity purposes of his business, literally kind of keeping the kind of, you know, buying and selling in play. But they're also, I mean, incredibly lavish. The Hotel Lebrun that they build in Paris is this, you know, vast space, you know, with, you know, grand sort of hallway corridors between his areas and her areas and, you know, fantastic objects and everything within. Must have been very sumptuous.

So there was a sort of transactional aspect to that relationship with the husband in as much that he introduced her. to the Dutch and Belgian masters and that world of art collectors. And she provided the cash and also the cachet, I would presume, of being such an important artist. Very much so. And one of the things I think she is unfairly pilloried for

and you made a good point earlier, Francesca, about how we hold her to a different standard than we do so often with men. There's many things she's criticised for, but that was common among people at the time. but one of the things that she was criticised for was not mentoring other women artists. So this was sort of at the time

there's meant to be this idea that, oh, you're a successful woman artist, therefore it's incumbent on you and other women artists of the time did. But it may well be that her husband didn't want her to spend her time doing that because he needed her income. He was very reliant on that

to keep sort of lubricating his art trade because of the, as Robert said, the expense of the objects he was buying. But the other things where I feel that she is, you know, she has been criticised for being very sort of glib about massive social inequality around her. So, you know, undoubtedly she said things which can be, you know, can make for uncomfortable reading about. She's on an Italian island having some exquisite picnic. And grateful hermits are given the sort of crumbs from their table.

They're given the leftovers. And then she talks about being in Vienna and never seeing a beggar. And then she gets to Russia and postillions. I mean, in a really troubling passage she talks about sort of postillions on carriages, young boys of sort of eight or nine, wearing really thin winter coats through the Russian winter. And she says, isn't it marvellous? They're so hardy.

Whereas a sort of, you know, a French grenadier would really struggle in this climate. But my point is that that was how, certain classes spoke, you know, and that was how men spoke an awful lot. And people were, you know, somebody who had successfully climbed to the heights the way that she did. They did adopt myopia to the reality of life around them because they needed to happily sort of socialise with the elite circles they were in and they needed to adopt those attitudes. It strikes me that she was a feminist, not by intent, but by example. She led by example about how do you break through these systems?

You're looking skeptical there, Francesca. No, I mean, I think Vijay and feminism is such a kind of interesting and fraught question. Because, I mean, the counterpoint that's often made is with probably even lesser-known artists today, Adelaide Labigillaar, who is admitted to the Royal Academy in Paris in the same year as Vigier. But she, Labigia, goes in the sort of proper way, if you will. So she's nominated by a male academician. She submits a reception piece in the formal way. She's accepted as a painter in portraits, whereas Vida's, as you were saying, Polly,

just kind of put in there by the king. And the comparison that's always made with the two is that, you know, Labigia is much more political. She's, I mean, very much in favour of the revolution, but she also runs a studio, which is very much about educating women and this idea that, you know, that all women, you know, but women deserve an opportunity to paint, that, you know, they have to be let into all these institutions.

and everything else in a way that while I think Vige is very keen for it for herself, I feel as if feminism or the kind of feminist literature has struggled to kind of what to make of a woman who is very personally successful but isn't necessarily paving the way for the people behind. But that's what I mean by example, how do you overcome the social and political barriers facing you if you're a woman? Because one of the things that strikes me about is she was, She was a tough business woman. Absolutely.

In all those different countries she visited, you know, she had to find her own way and make a success of it. I think, you know, there's no doubt that it's that determination that sees her through in her industry. She was, I mean, she produced maybe a thousand works. She was one of the most productive artists of her day. A thousand works? Up to, yeah, calculated.

I mean, that's just amazing. So she probably didn't have much time, you know, to be nurturing other people. Exactly. Where are they all now? Where are they all? Well, they are scattered across the world, but the main centres of her work would be Paris, Russia and America. So those are the biggest concentrations, and particularly the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Louvre in Versailles in France,

and then in America and the Met and the National Gallery in Washington. So the main conglomerations of her work. Here in London we have four paintings by her and another at Windsor, so that's not bad going. And one at the Barber Institute. And one at the Barber. Which is one of the best. Thank you.

How did that end up at the Barber Institute? Yes, I mean, that's a real outlier because I would say the taste for her work is an interesting subject to study. And historically, collectors as opposed to patrons have tended to be very wealthy, super wealthy people who had a taste for the Enchant regime and all it stood for in terms of the luxury arts. And so you get Ross Childs and Lord Harbournors. Hartford, the founder of the Hartford Wallace Collection, those sort of collectors in America, the super wealthy of the Gilded Age.

And so to buy a painting by Visual Abright in 1980 was a really strange thing, which is what the director of the barber did, Hamish Miles. But he said, it's still in our records, that he wanted to buy a painting by Visualiburon, to, as it were, offer a challenge to Reynolds and Gainsborough by whom we already had portraits. So that's quite interesting take for 1980, I think, to do that.

And it's still one of the very few works that has been acquired in this country by her in relatively recent years. So it's a bit of an outlier. But hopefully more people will be taking note of her work. It's better than what we have in our archives, which is that when the National Gallery acquires the self-portrait in 1897, it's a write-up in a newspaper that says, well, it's very nice, but it's got absolutely no skill, talent or anything good about it. it's a skillful work of the plum box order.

I think it's this idea of being sort of chocolate boxy and decorative, but with nothing beyond that. That's pretty extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, that critique is of its time. Of its time. I do think some of that lingers, though. There's sense of things that are merely decorative or surface and don't have much depth to them.

I think the challenge now is to... There is such weight and there's such gravitas to some of her pictures, but because she was such a consummate painter, She was brilliant with the brush. She could do, you know, hair like nobody else and fur and all of those things. And people get a bit stuck on that without moving beyond it. I think she should be seen as one of the great colourists in art. I mean, obviously that influence of Rubens comes through there.

But her skill in that respect is really outstanding. And that's one of the things that makes her work so memorable. And I love the fact, if I may, that in her self-portraits, she really does focus on showing her skills. So showing herself at work on a canvas and the one that she was commissioned to paint for the Uffizi, she shows herself at work on a portrait of Marie Antoinette. And decades later, when she was admitted to the Russian Academy of Arts,

she produces a self-portrait. But in this one, she shows herself at work on a portrait of Maria Fyodorovna, who was the wife of Paul I, who was herself a really significant amateur artist. And I love that there's something, sort of almost cyclical about it. But later in life, there's this kind of, there is a relationship between two artists coming from such different places

and living in different lives. But nonetheless, they would have met and they would have talked to each other about what they were trying to produce or what they were producing. And she also received commissions from Potemkin, Pachomkin. She did, slightly uncomfortable ones.

So Petyomkin had five nieces. Patiomkin being one of Catherine the Great's Well, arguably her greatest paramour and the one with whom she maintained a very, very close relationship long after their affair came to an end. But he had five nieces, and he had intimate relations with three of them when they were sort of early to mid-teens. And there's one especially a Katerina Skavronska.

Who was married to the ambassador, the Russian ambassador to Sicily, but she stayed in St. Petersburg, you know, very much. under his control and he commissions a portrait, well he commissions many portraits of her, as does her husband in a really unnerving sort of competitive way. But they are, she becomes stereotyped as this very sensual creature. There's, you know, folds of fabric falling between her legs. And all the writing about her, of which there's an extensive passage in Vijay's memoirs, they talk about her being sort of completely vacuous and without spirit and without interest.

and she lies around on a divan. But there's bits of the story that are really disturbing. She, the sitter, Skavronska, talks of only being able to sleep if she has sheet, her words, a slave, lying under her bed, sort of reciting stories to her. And it's hard not to speculate that this is, you know, this is some sort of traumatic, ongoing sort of traumatic experience playing out. So, yeah, Patjonkin is an uncomfortable figure in this story. Wow.

Anything else before Simon comes in for a final time with his tea and coffee offering? Picking up on what Francesca started to say about pastels and landscapes, there are, according to Vige's memoirs, she made some 100 pastels in England as well of seascapes and landscapes, which have just disappeared. Yet to be found. So do look out, everyone. So, art sleuths, here's an alert for you. Thank you all very much. That was such fun. I really enjoyed it.

Right. Well, you would like tea or coffee for last? Tea, please. And Simon, congratulations. Thank you. No, I didn't realise. Thank you. Tea please, come. So that's the four cheese? Four teas.

Four teas. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, is that for Simon? Oh, wow. Lucky us. Oh, wow. A special episode. In our time with Misha Gleney is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production. So Alice Lockstone, I'm here for the history.

Well, Ben Henderson, I like the formality. And that's perfect because we have a lot of history to share. Why did tea become such a British obsession? How did English turn into the language we speak today? And yes, why do women's clothes still not have pockets? Well, in our new podcast, here for the history, we're investigating how stories from the past shape everyday life today.

Basically the things we've all noticed but never stopped to question. Listen on BBC Sounds or watch on YouTube. Just search for Here for the History.