Rosalind Polly Blakesley

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

Rosalind Polly Blakesley’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

I think it starts at the point that she and her mother and her stepfather, who was not a man she got on well with, moved into one of the hotels in Paris.

They rented an apartment.

And the main occupant of that hotel was her future husband, Mr. Lebrun.

And she, at this point, becomes acquainted with one of Paris's great art dealers, a real mover and shaker.

in the art scene, and she becomes acquainted with the sort of people he's hosting, as well as having met the people Francesca was describing.

And she eventually marries him.

It's not a thrillingly happy marriage.

He uses her and he encourages her to paint.

But he also uses her very much as a, you know, as a means of creating further income.

She, of course, benefits from the contacts and the connections.

So she becomes, you know, she does become part of the salon that they together ran, which is a popular place to meet.

And in some way, we're not completely sure, she's brought to the attention of Marie Antoinette.

This is 1778.

She's exactly the same age as Marie Antoinette.

We can't know, but we might speculate that either Cortes or possibly Marie Antoinette's mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, felt that there could be a connection here of these two women together.

mobilising and having to navigate a world which was always going to be challenging to a certain extent.

There would have been correspondence.

So these courts and these cities, they're so well interconnected.

And so the word of up-and-coming artists would spread quite well between correspondence, between visiting diplomats, whatever it was.

So she's invited to Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette and she does a good job.

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