Painting the posh ..... Madam Le Brun ...... on the wireless today

Vigée Le Brun, my Wikipedia tells me "was a French painter who mostly specialized in portrait painting, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries".*

Élisabeth Louise Vigée, Self Portrait, after 1782

And what a fascinating women she was.

Her life and work is discussed on this week's edition of In Our Time.**

"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.

With Rosalind Polly Blakesley,Master of Pembroke College and Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge, Robert Wenley, Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, and, Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, Curator of Later Italian, Spanish and French Paintings at The National Gallery, London.

Producer: Simon Tillotson"

Location; In Our Time, BBc Radio 4

Picture; Élisabeth Louise Vigée, Self Portrait, after 1782, National Gallery, Location; room 33, Accession number, NG1653

*Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lisabeth_Vig%C3%A9e_Le_Brun

**Vigée Le Brun, In Our Time, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002y1gt