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
No, I mean, I think Vigée 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 Labiguillard, who is admitted to the Royal Academy in Paris in the same year as Vigée, but she...
La Biguière 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 Vigée, 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, La Biguia 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, not all women, 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 Vigée 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 her.
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, nothing beyond that.
So, yeah.
Of its time.
I do think some of that lingers, though, this sense of things that are merely decorative or surface and don't have much depth to them.
Yet to be found.
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