Robert Wenley

speaker

164 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Robert Wenley’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

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I think because largely she was more sympathetic to women.

And I think also they would naturally more likely gravitate to a female artist.

Also, she was very adept at introducing fashion and conveying fashion.

She was very fashionable herself.

She liked to depict her female subjects in loose, informal clothing, relatively speaking, to loosen up their bodies, as it were.

And I think that's something that enabled them to be more expressive and her to capture that more.

But that's not to say that she wasn't successful with male portraits.

I think the ratio is about four to one.

But there's some very successful male portraits, such as Cologne in the Royal Collection, which is a magnificent painting, one of her masterpieces.

But she was chaperoned, right?

Yes.

Well, those men that she suspected were there partly because she was very good looking and they had maybe ulterior motives.

There's an anecdote that she relays in her

memoirs that if they gave her the glad eye so to speak she would paint them so that their eyes were looking into the far distance that's how they were posed and if she caught them glancing in her direction taking away from the pose she would immediately say to them I'm doing the eyes now and they would have to snap back and not be ogling her that and her mother who as you say was her chaperone certainly in her early career would be chucking away at this so

Well, she was very successful.

Unfortunately, in her early career, a lot of her money was siphoned off first by her stepfather and then by her husband, who, running a business as he did and dealing with old master paintings, was constantly needing money to buy to replenish his stock.

And so in that period, a lot of her money she didn't retain.

But later on in her career, certainly in the years, you know, the later 1780s and when she was traveling through Europe, she was immensely successful.

She was able to get away with charging top prices wherever she went.

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