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 · last 12 months

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 the challenge now is that there is such weight and there's such gravitas to some of her pictures.

But because she was such a consummate painter, she was brilliant with the brush.

She could do, you know, hair like nobody else and fur and all of those things.

And people get a bit stuck on that without moving beyond it.

And I love the fact, if I may, that in her self-portraits, she really does focus on showing her skills.

So showing herself at work on a canvas and the one that she was commissioned to paint for the Uffizi, she shows herself at work on a portrait of Marie Antoinette.

And decades later, when she was admitted to the Russian Academy of Arts, she produces a self-portrait.

But in this one, she shows herself at work on a portrait of Maria Fyodorovna, who was the wife of Paul I, who was herself a really significant amateur artist.

And I love that there's something sort of almost cyclical about it.

But later in life, there's this kind of

There is a relationship between two artists coming from such different places and living in different lives.

But nonetheless, they would have met and they would have talked to each other about what they were trying to produce or what they were producing.

She did.

Slightly uncomfortable ones.

So Potemkin had five nieces, Potemkin being one of Catherine the Great's, well, arguably her greatest paramour and the one with whom she maintained a very, very close relationship long after their affair came to an end.

But he had five nieces and he had intimate relations with three of them when they were sort of early to mid teens.

And there's one especially, Katerina Skavronskaya, who was married to the ambassador, the Russian ambassador to Sicily.

But she stayed in St.

Petersburg, you know, very much under his control.

And he commissions a portrait collection.

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