Francesca Whitlum-Cooper
speaker
176 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Francesca Whitlum-Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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 Vigée, 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 coloured crayons, enormously popular portraits.
in 18th century France.
And I think that is probably the kind of thing that marks Vigée 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 in her memoirs.
She's obviously very close with him.
There's a sense in Origny, is he a very sociable, genial person?
There's much description about the kind of soirees, 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, trots off to dinner not wearing his wig but wearing his cap.
So her father is not a member of the Académie Royale, so the French Royal Academy, but he is a member of the artist's guild in Paris, the Académie 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 that's sort of where she begins that's where her story starts.
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, you know, 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?
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