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

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 Salon de la Correspondance, 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 people.

Beautiful portraits, you know, a large amount of these Salon accounts is given over to Vigée Lebrun.

There's much discussion of what she's exhibiting.

There are compliments about the vivacity of the sitters, the touche, 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 a woman.

And in fact, you know, 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 Vigee Le Brun is a kind of sham.

And, you know, 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 elaborate hoax, rather than to kind of confront the realities of a young, attractive, very talented, very commercially successful portraitist.

It's fascinating.

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 Vigée Le Brun seem important to point out is 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 Vigée Le Brun'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 Vigée Le Brun in a way that we perhaps don't.

So true.

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