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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But she was so fashionable and so much in demand that she could do it.
And she became very wealthy indeed.
Well, that's an interesting episode and relationship.
So born Amy Lyon, actually, in the Wirral.
She adopted various names, but eventually called herself Emma Hart.
and came to the attention of the youngest son of the Earl of Warwick, who took her on as his mistress.
And in that circle, she then started sort of posing for artists, notably Romney.
And she's particularly notable for her looks.
Obviously, she's very beautiful, but had what was seen at the time as sort of Grecian features, antique Grecian features.
And she would dress up in antique clothing or as understood at the time and adopt these poses or attitudes like tableau vivant.
Eventually, Lord Greville got tired of her, we're told, and passed her on charmingly to his uncle, who was William Hamilton in Naples.
And she was by this time, she was very noted throughout Europe.
Goethe, for instance, had...
seen her attitudes and praised them.
So she was seen as this sort of living representation of ancient Greek art.
And was Vigée Lebrun able to experiment with that, as it were?
The portraits she made of her and their three principal ones and some sort of variants of them
she would regard them not as portraits but as history paintings because although they have her facial features, she's posed in allegorical guise, so as a Bacchante or as Ariadne or, in other cases, as the Cumaean Sybil.
So she's in these historical, mythological guises, and I think that reflects partly how Vigée Le Brun
understood her status.
Showing 21–40 of 164 · page 2 of 9
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