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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

In Our Time · Vigée Le Brun · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

I would say it's not a great job.

It's not one of her great portraits, but she does a classic ceremonial court portrait where Marie Antoinette is in a beautiful dress with panniers to extend the dress out to the sides.

The bit that makes you realise it's a relatively early work of this ilk is

in Vigée Le Brun's career is that to the right of Marie Antoinette there's an enormous great pedestal with a bust of Louis XVI on it and the proportions aren't great.

This bust sort of looms over the sitter and later you would have a slightly more sort of felicitous arrangement.

But she does well and it is approved of at court and it's sent to the mother, to Maria Theresa in Vienna and

And then further sort of copies and iterations are produced for other European courts.

One goes as far as the US.

So this becomes a kind of calling card for her.

There's a little bit of editing that goes on over time and she becomes slightly less afflicted with that family trait.

Oh, it's so high stakes because for Vigée Lebrun, she's got to nail it.

You know, this is her moment to show she can do the most prestigious, best paid portraits for one of the greatest patrons there was at the time.

The French royal family was, you know, you were landing a big fish if you were painting for them.

For Marie Antoinette, she's a young foreign queen.

There are lots of rumours beginning to circulate about her already.

And every single time she's painted, she, as part of the sort of portrait contract, if you like, she's making a statement about who she is and the position she occupies.

Whether she is deferring to her husband, whether she presents a threat.

So getting that sort of balance between the kind of hauteur, the dignity, the majesty of a portrait of a queen.

But at the same time, this sense of her being, you know, she has to be maternal.

She has to be very deferential to her husband.

Showing 21–40 of 237 · page 2 of 12