Rosalind Polly Blakesley

speaker

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

So this was, you know, sort of at the time there's meant to be this idea that, oh, you're a successful woman artist, therefore it's incumbent on you.

and other women artists of the time did.

But it may well be that her husband didn't want her to spend her time doing that because he needed her income.

He was very reliant on that to keep sort of lubricating his art trade because of the, as Robert said, the expense of the objects he was buying.

But the other things where I feel that she is, you know, she has been

criticised for being very sort of glib about massive social inequality around her.

So, you know, undoubtedly she said things which can be, you know, can make for uncomfortable reading about she's on an Italian island having some exquisite picnic and grateful hermits are given the sort of crumbs from their table.

They're given the leftovers.

And then she talks about being in Vienna and never seeing...

a beggar, and then she gets to Russia and postillions.

I mean, in a really troubling passage, she talks about sort of postillions on carriages, young boys of sort of eight or nine, wearing really thin winter coats through the Russian winter.

And she says, isn't it marvellous?

They're so hardy, whereas a sort of, you know, a French grenadier would really struggle in this

But my point is that that was how certain classes spoke, you know, and that was how men spoke an awful lot.

And people were, you know, somebody who had successfully climbed to the heights the way that she did.

They did adopt myopia to the reality of life around them because they needed to.

to happily sort of socialise with the elite circles they were in and needed to adopt those attitudes.

One at the Barber.

Really?

Which is one of the best.

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