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

Let's turn to that quite soon.

But just a few days later, the empress dies of almost certainly a stroke.

So that portrait never came about.

Again, because we can't rely on the memoirs, it may be that that was a very convenient fiction.

But coming back to a sort of more positive way of thinking about Vijay, what she managed consummately well was to stay in favour in the viper's nest that could be the Russian court.

I mean, I couldn't agree more.

And I really enforce the idea there is an intellectualism to her thinking and to her planning of her portraits.

And Robert talked about the portraits of Emma Hamilton.

You know, it's not serendipitous that they're coming out the way they are and can be very compellingly positioned as a sort of history painting portrait.

penetrate that elite as it were but it's interesting when so francesca was talking about her admission to the french academy which as you say was was slightly tainted because she was married to an art dealer and academicians were never meant to be involved in the grubby matter of

buying and selling art, you know, perish the thought.

And so even being married to an art dealer disqualified her from being elected to the Academy.

And, you know, going back in her history, what we're doing here is that so that Marie Antoinette asked Louis XVI to intervene.

And so in effect, it was by a royal fiat that she was admitted to the Academy and people held that against her as, you know, she's been

You know, she's got in through the back door.

But when she was admitted as her presentation piece, she painted a history painting, which is a real statement of, you know, and I can do this.

You might have seen my portraits of Marie Antoinette or of all the other figures in Paris she was painting at that point.

And she also much later, and I don't think, I think these two things are connected.

In 1800, she is admitted as what was called an honorary free associate.

So it's a very high honorific status.

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