Francesca Whitlum-Cooper

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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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Vigée Le Brun · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

She has the opportunity to study a little bit in the Louvre.

She has people like Claude-Joseph Vernet, 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.

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 Vigée Le Brun makes with her husband in 1781 to Brussels, and then 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 Prince of Lorraine.

So he's died in...

His great artworks are coming up for sale.

And obviously, her husband is a picture dealer.

As Robert said, he's very interested in what he can go and see there.

And we know that one of the pictures that they look at is a Rubens portrait, today known to be of his sister-in-law, Susanna London, today also in the National Gallery, which is very felicitous.

And Vigée has long admired Rubens.

She talks early on that Rubens is one of the people that she copies.

But the picture in particular, the portrait of Susanna London, is known at the time as the chapeau de paille 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.

I think it's probably a sort of a slight mishearing of chapeau de paille, which is straw, or chapeau de poil, which is felt.

In the sort of 18th century French, it's thought to have been a mishearing.

But regardless of what it looked like, it was called the straw hat picture.

And the hat's importance to that Rubens picture is that it casts the most incredible shadow over the sitter's face.

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