Vigée Le Brun

28:14But despite having irritated the Empress, it doesn't appear to have damaged her reputation in St Petersburg. She stays for a while, doesn't she? She stays for six years. She does incredibly well. And she, very soon after the slightly ill-fated portrait of these young granddaughters, she portrays the wife of Catherine the Great's grandson, oldest grandson, a woman called Grand Duchess Elisaveta Alexeyevna. And this is another huge great state portrait that is superb. I was a bit disobliging of one of the early ones of Marie Antoinette. This one is absolutely fabulous. And that is well received by the Empress.

28:53And they meet in the Winter Palace for the Empress to have a look at it and give her verdict. And the verdict is given. And again, in Vigée's memoirs, she says that in that meeting, Catherine was so impressed by it that slightly grudgingly she says, everybody is saying that you should paint my portrait. I will sit for you. 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 Vigée, what she managed consummately well was to stay in favour in the viper's nest that could be the Russian court.

29:45Robert Wenley, while she was in Russia, Vigée painted Countess Gullovina and that painting hangs at the Barber Institute where you are presently employed. What does that tell us about her skills, that portrait? Which again, looking at it, there's something very compelling about her expression. Yes, it's a much-loved painting in the Barber. I think many people would say it's their favourite painting of our collection. And it's certainly one of her most successful paintings made while she was in Russia. I think there's no doubt about that. It's a very engaging painting, above all. The way that Golovina is posed is she's looking at you straight on, and you can't really escape her brown eyes.

30:29They just bore into you. She also holds around her body tightly a bright red wrap, scarlet wrap, which is probably a studio prop. But it's done in a way that evokes, again, paintings by Rubens and Titian. So she's evoking the old masters. It's slightly sort of erotic, I suppose, in the pose, in the way that the body's so tightly wrapped like that. But it's above all the expression that captivates you. the head is and the figure is against a very spare background a monochrome background with just a diagonal streak of light so it's really much the head and the pose that really engages you and I think this is an example of where she's really responding with warmth to the sitter and where we know from her memoirs that she really we know that she really appreciated the sitter on a personal level and engaged with them I think that really comes out in the paintings and we know from her own memoirs and this is also backed up by Golovina's own memoirs that they had a very close relationship that Vigée Le Brun appreciated Golovina's wit her musical ability she apparently composed and sang love songs and also a talented drawing and up on all the latest literature from Paris it's a great masterpiece Thank you Robert Francesca, what is it that is enduring about Vigée?

31:55I think there are a few things. I mean, I think one, inevitably, you know, she is an artist, as all artists are, painting in their time and their moment. And I think the nature of who she's painting and the moment in which she's working means that she does give us this extraordinary glimpse, certainly in the French context of the last gasp of the Ancien Régime, if you will. You know, we just see these incredible likenesses of all these characters who go on many of them to have untimely deaths or long periods as emigres and everything else. So I think there is this sense that, you know, she kind of captures Europe at this particular moment or whether it's, you know, with Emma Hamilton in Naples or other people across the courts that she travels to.

32:34For me, maybe the slight injustice that we do with Vigée is because these are very dazzling portraits and they're very engaging at a kind of surface level. I mean, literally her painted surfaces, she's fabulous at painting fabrics. She really does paint these beautiful complexions, these very engaging sitters. I think there's been a tendency to look at her or treat her as if everything is just surface. Whereas, in fact, I do think this is an artist who's thinking very carefully about what her legacy will be and positioning herself in the sort of continuum, in the canon, if you will, of the old masters.

33:05So we know that she copies old master paintings early on in her career. We know before she marries the art dealer Le Brun, you know, he's lending her works, you know, even as they're living in the same house for her to copy. You know, the entrance into the academy is so important to her. It means so much to her that she would be able to do that, you know. And actually, when it happens in the end, it's done on order of the king. And, you know, she's sort of slightly disparaged for it. But throughout her career, throughout her compositions, we see this kind of engagement with, you know, old master painting that I think, I do think that is actually something of hers.

33:39endures. I think there is a way of seeing her in this context where she is taking herself very, very seriously and maybe asking us to do the same. Polly, you wanted to come in there. 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 and can be very compellingly positioned as a sort of history painting portrait. She wanted to see herself as a history artist but couldn't really penetrate that elite, as it were.

34:16But it's interesting when Francesca was talking about her admission to the French Academy, which, as you say, 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 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.

34:55But 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 position to the Russian Academy, the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. And for that, she describes, you know, beautifully every moment of the admission ceremony.

35:35She describes walking into the hall. It's a room I've been in. The Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg is in the same building it was in when she was there. And she describes walking up through sort of serried ranks of admirers to the president at that time, a man called Stroganov. And she's just clearly really proud because here's her moment of doing it on her own merits without any intervention from anybody else. And it's sort of this is mine. This is my achievement. Robert Wenley, what did Vijay make of England and what did England make of her? Yes, good question. So it's a little known fact that she actually visited England between 1803 and 1805 in a period when there was sort of peace briefly between France and England, a break in the Napoleonic Wars.

36:21So she was able to come over and, as it were, try her luck with the English court and English society. It was a little bit of a disappointment in the sense that she didn't much like the weather in London. It was sort of damp and dirty, as she described it. the fact that no one did anything on a Sunday she found a bit depressing so those were some of the negatives on the positive side she loved getting out and about she went to the sort of spa towns Bath and Brighton and Tunbridge Wells over to the Isle of Wight she again connected with the French émigré and the Russian émigré community such as it was wherever she went she was trying to recreate those golden years at the end of the ancien régime always trying to go back to that golden age for her.

37:04She did meet sympathetic people. There was a Mrs Chinnery. She was a sort of patron of the arts and she managed to get a commission from the Prince of Wales, which was another big deal, the future George IV. So she was maintaining her standards even if she found the weather unclear. Yes. I mean, she didn't stay as long as she did in Russia and she was partly constrained from leaving earlier because of resumption of hostilities between England and France. That's not to say that she didn't make some interesting portraits here and she still was able to command high prices and still met opposition from local artists.

37:40Francesca, about the local artists and other artists and critics, because she did incredibly well commercially, let's face it, but what did her fellow artists and what did the critics say of her at the time? Maybe the best we can say is that she had a mixed critical reception. So, I mean, if you go back through the write-ups and the commentaries on the Salon in Paris and the exhibitions there, both the Salon de la Correspondence, and then once she's become an academician, she's able to exhibit at the kind of the main Academy Salon as well. And it is really sort of a tale of two halves because on the one hand you have these descriptions of these beautiful portraits, you know, a large amount of these salon accounts is given over to Vigée Lebrun, there's much discussion of what she's exhibiting, there are compliments about the vivacity of the sitters, the touche, you know, actually the way she has painted them, the flair that she brings to portraiture.

38:32and yet there is at the same time this very clear discomfort with whether it's the femininity of these portraits, whether it's the idea that they're more flattering than they are truthful, whether it's a sense that she's using her own femininity, that were she not a woman artist, would we be, even then they're saying, would we be remarking on these in the same way if they weren't painted by women? And in fact, there is this long-running rumour, which gets written about quite a bit, that there's this poor, heartsick young artist who's so in love with her that actually he's not only just finishing her portraits, but actually maybe he's painting the whole thing secretly.

39:11And the whole idea of Vigée Le Brun is a kind of sham. And the idea that it's actually genuinely easier for people in the French art world to believe that, to believe that the whole thing is a kind of an elaborate hoax rather than to kind of confront the realities of a young, attractive, very talented, very commercially successful portraitist. It's fascinating. Polly, she gets her own back when she writes her memoirs, but people don't really believe the memoirs, do they? Her memoirs are enigmatic and confounding and a brilliant read, partly because she can be so waspish about people. I mean, she can just be so unkind.

39:53there's one woman she really has it in for the Duchess de Mazarin who is stout and ugly and lots of very unkind words but the best bit is she describes a dinner party where the Duchess apparently decided it's a dinner party for 100 guests and the Duchess decides that she will have her cook serve an enormous pie in which there are 100 tiny living birds and with great rigmarole the pie is cut open but all these birds fly up and they decide to settle in the hairdos of the guests, which are these, you know, vast powdered wigs heading up skywards. It's a comic read at times. But the bit that becomes complicated is when, you know, as an art historian or a cultural historian, you're trying to work out what relations might actually have been like.

40:42And one of the leitmotifs throughout the memoirs is she's ever demonstrating ways in which very high-placed patrons were incredibly kind to her because she was such a sort of deserving person. So early doors, she talks about missing a sitting with Marie Antoinette because she was heavily pregnant and going to apologise the next day and being so flustered that she drops her paints and that Marie Antoinette herself bends down to pick them up. And then much later in St. Petersburg, she talks about the Grand Duchess Elisabeth Alexeyevna, who when Vijay felt faint you know brings her water and brings her round and then in the least likely of many examples of this there's a moment when Alexander I comes to the throne in Russia and he apparently goes so far as to get off his horse in the street to greet her and say you must do an equestrian portrait.

41:35Now she's never done an equestrian portrait in in her life so the probability of this is is really quite low. It's a complicated history if you're looking for a historical record. Francesca, a brief comment from you on that. I don't disagree at all, Polly, with what you've said and about the unreliability of the memoirs. The only thing that it does in the context of talking about Vigée Lebrun seem important to point out is I think the unreliability of artists' memoirs is actually a trope of the genre itself. And I think I do feel that we maybe comment a little bit more on Vigée Lebrun's unreliability, more than we would say the very, very many male artists who have these wonderful stories about being child prodigies and scribbling drawings everywhere and being picked up and young genius and these wonderful patrons who meet them in the street.

42:19I'm just, it's not that I disagree with you at all, but I do think it's interesting that art historically, critically, we all kind of hone in on it with Vigée Le Brun in a way that we perhaps don't. So true. Robert, a final word from you. Her reputation today. It's interesting where we are with her, actually, because there have been very few exhibitions on her. There was one in 1982 and one in 2015, neither of which came to this country. I'm glad to say at the Barber we are doing one next year, 2027, on her work that's in England and her connections with England. But where she sits in sort of feminist canon is a matter of some debate because she obviously was remarkably successful.

42:59She was in many ways exceptional but she was also very much tied to the Ancien regime so that makes it difficult in a political sense. She was quite dismissive of less wealthy people. And as I said earlier, she was always trying to go back, to heart back to that golden time as she saw it. She was very much pro the Bourbon dynasty. She didn't like Napoleon and all he stood for. So I think she's a complex character. She should be perhaps better known and more widely known in terms of her great masterpieces and the range of her work. It's not just female subjects. It's not just queens. There's amazing portraits of artists, of singers, not just aristocrats.

43:38Francesca, her reputation? I think growing, I think we also have more work to do. I think actually the more work that is done the more complexity comes out of Vigée Le Brun and I think even if you're looking at her, it's relatively recently the large group of pastels that she made, pastel landscapes were discovered that she made on her travels, not the kind of flashy court portraits but actually just a way of looking at someone who's introduced to art through this medium by her father and then, you know, 50 years later is still doing them on her travels in Switzerland. I think there's a lot more for us to uncover and a lot more to take seriously.

44:13Polly, your verdict? She was competitive, she was audacious, she was fearless, she was self-assured. She absolutely deserves the rise in interest that is happening now. My thanks to Robert Wenley, Francesca Whitlam-Cooper and Polly Blakesley and also to producer Simon Tillotson as it's his last time in this studio after 11 years as the great engine of In Our Time. Next week, it's seashells in the oceans and, of course, on the seashore. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. Good. So now what I wanted to know, which we didn't really touch on, and that is her personal relationships and in particular with the daughter.

45:09The daughter, it seems to me to have been a very that's a very complicated relationship. Any of you got thoughts on that? Well, obviously, she was Julie. The daughter was the subject of those maternal portraits. Beautiful portraits. Beautiful portraits. And she seems, you'd take from those portraits, certainly really doted on her in her early life. But then the relationship seems to have deteriorated and quite dramatically. But she follows her around the European courts. Yes, so she joins her. Well, she duly marries the secretary to the director of the Imperial Theatres in Russia. but it's a marriage that she doesn't approve of.

45:55This is Vigée Le Brun. And things deteriorate from that point. And it's a rather sad ending to Julie's life. She ends up dying in poverty even though her mother is one of the wealthiest people around. So there was clearly a big breakdown in their relationship which you wouldn't guess from those very early double portraits. I think in a way that's sort of mirrored across her life. In a way, it's so unusual, actually, to come across someone in the 18th or early 19th century who lives to almost 87. But then you realise, actually, that, you know, in the 1810s, she loses her brother with whom she's been very close.

46:30You know, Julie dies. Her husband, you know, obviously they do, they separate and there's a financial, you know, disentangling. But, you know, when she returns to France, she goes back to live in the Hotel Le Bon with him. She loses all these people and then lives for another, you know, 25 years. Is it true that the husband was a gambler? Yes. So I think the husband is, you know, a fantastic art dealer, also likes gambling, also likes prostitutes. And, you know, as you alluded to, Robert, you know, the nature of the art market is you need a lot of money to make a lot of money. And so having a wife who's commanding all these fantastic prices is very useful for kind of the liquidity purposes of his business, literally kind of keeping the kind of buying and selling in play.

47:13But they're also, I mean, incredibly lavish. The Hotel Le Brun that they build in Paris is this vast space, you know, with grand sort of hallway corridors between his areas and her areas and, you know, fantastic objects and everything within. It must have been very sumptuous. So there was a sort of transactional aspect to that relationship with the husband in as much that he introduced her to the Dutch and Belgian masters and that world of art collectors. And she provided the cash and also the cachet, I would presume, of being such an important artist. Very much so. And one of the things I think she is unfairly pilloried for, and you made a good point earlier, Francesca, about how we hold her to a different standard than we do so often with men.

48:02There's many things she's criticised for, but that was common among people at the time. But one of the things that she was criticised for was not mentoring other women artists. 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. You know, he was very reliant on that to keep, you know, sort of lubricating his art trade because of the, as Robert said, the expense of the objects he was buying.

48:38But 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 give them 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.

49:24And she says, isn't it marvellous? They're so hardy. Whereas a sort of, you know, a French grenadier would really struggle in this in this climate. 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 happily sort of socialize with the elite circles they were in and needed to adopt those attitudes. It strikes me that she was a feminist not by intent, but by example.

50:04She led by example about how do you break through these systems? You're looking sceptical there, Francesca. No, I mean, I just I do. I think Vigée and feminism is such a kind of interesting and fraught question, because, I mean, the the counterpoint that's often made is with a probably even lesser known artist today, Adelaide Labiguiar, who is admitted to the Royal Academy in Paris in the same year as Vigée. But she, La Bigia, goes in the sort of proper way, if you will. So she's nominated by a male academician. She submits a reception piece in the formal way. She's accepted as a painter in portraits, whereas Vijay, as you were saying, Polly, just kind of put in there by the king.

50:43And the comparison that's always made with the two is that, you know, La Biguia is much more political. She's, I mean, very much in favor of the revolution, but she also runs a studio which is very much about educating women. And this idea that, you know, that all women, you know, not all women, but women deserve an opportunity to paint that, you know, they have to be let into all these institutions and everything else in a way that while I think Vigée is very keen for it for herself. I feel as if feminism or the kind of feminist literature has struggled to kind of what to make of a woman who is very personally successful but isn't necessarily paving the way for the people behind her.

51:19But that's what I mean by example, i.e. you know, how do you overcome the social and political barriers facing you if you're a woman? Because one of the things that strikes me about her is she was tough. She was a tough businesswoman. Absolutely. Absolutely. In all those different countries she visited, you know, she had to find her own way and make a success of it. I think, you know, there's no doubt that it's that determination that sees her through in her industry. She was, I mean, she produced maybe a thousand works. She was one of the most productive artists of her day. A thousand works? Up to, yeah, calculated.

51:54I mean, that's just amazing. So she probably didn't have much time, you know, to... To be nurturing other people. Exactly. Where are they all now? Where are they all? Well, they are scattered across the world, but the main centres of her work would be Paris, Russia and America. So those are the biggest concentrations, and particularly the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Louvre and Versailles in France, and then in America in the Met and the National Gallery in Washington are sort of the main conglomerations of her work. Here in London, we have four paintings by her and another at Windsor. So that's not bad going.

52:33And one at the Barber Institute. One at the Barber. Which is one of the best. Thank you. How did that end up at the Barber Institute? Yes, I mean, that's a real outlier because I would say the taste for her work is an interesting subject to study. And historically, collectors as opposed to patrons have tended to be very wealthy, super wealthy people who had a taste for the Ancien Régime and all it stood for in terms of the sort of luxury arts. and so you get Rothschilds and Lord Hartford, the founder of the Hartford-Wallace collection, those sort of collectors in America, the super wealthy of the Gilded Age.

53:09And so to buy a painting by Vigilabrante in 1980 was a really strange thing, which is what the director of the Barber did, Hamish Miles, but he said, it's still in our records, that he wanted to buy a painting by Vigilabrante to, as it were, offer a challenge to Reynolds in Gainsborough by whom we already had portraits. So that's quite an interesting take for 1980, I think, to do that. And it's still one of the very few works that has been acquired in this country by her in relatively recent years. So it's a bit of an outlier. But hopefully more people will be taking note of her work. It's better than what we have in our archives, which is that when the National Gallery acquires the self-portrait in 1897, there's a write-up in a newspaper that says, well, it's very nice, but it's got absolutely no skill, talent, or anything good about it.

53:59It's a skilful work of the plum box order. I think it's this idea of being sort of chocolate boxy and decorative but with nothing beyond that. That's pretty extraordinary, isn't it? It's of its time. That critique is of its time, obviously. Of its time. I do think some of that lingers, though, this sense of things that are merely decorative or surface and don't have much depth to them. I think the challenge now is to... 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.

54:35And people get a bit stuck on that without moving beyond it. I think she should be seen as one of the great colourists in art. I mean, obviously that influence of Rubens comes through there. But her skill in that respect is really outstanding. And that's one of the things that makes her work so memorable. 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.

55:15But 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. And she also received commissions from Potemkin, Pachomkin. She did, slightly uncomfortable ones.

55:50So Pachomkin had five nieces, Patjomkin 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, a Katarina Skavronska, who was married to the Russian ambassador to Sicily, but she stayed in St. Petersburg, you know, very much under his control and he commissions a portrait, well he commissions many portraits of her as does her husband in a really unnerving sort of competitive way but they are, she becomes stereotyped as this very sensual creature there's, you know, folds of fabric falling between her legs and all the writing about her, of which there's an extensive passage in Vijay's memoirs They talk about her being sort of completely vacuous and without spirit and without interest and she lies around on a divan.

56:58But there's bits of the story that are really disturbing. She, the sitter, Skavronskaya, talks of only being able to sleep if she has, her words, a slave lying under her bed sort of reciting stories to her. And it's hard not to speculate that this is some sort of traumatic, ongoing sort of traumatic experience playing out. So, yeah, Panteomkin is an uncomfortable figure in this story. Wow. Anything else before Simon comes in for a final time with his tea and coffee offering? Picking up on what Francesca started to say about pastels and landscapes, there are, according to Vigée's memoirs, she made some 100 pastels in England as well of seascapes and landscapes, which have just disappeared.

57:46Yet to be found. So do look out, everyone. So, Art Sleuths, here's an alert for you. Thank you all very much. That was such fun. I really enjoyed it. Right. Well, who would like tea or coffee for the last time? Tea, please. And Simon, congratulations. It's 11 years. No, I didn't realise. Thank you. Tea, please. So that's four teas. Four teas. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, is that for Simon? Yes. Oh, wow. Lucky us. Oh, wow. OK. Special episode. In Our Time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. So, Alice Loxton, I'm here for the history. Well, Ben Henderson, I like the formality.

58:34And that's perfect because we have a lot of history to share. Why did tea become such a British obsession? How did English turn into the language we speak today? And yes, why do women's clothes still not have pockets? Well, in our new podcast, Here for the History, we're investigating how stories from the past shape everyday life today. Basically, the things we've all noticed but never stopped to question. Listen on BBC Sounds. Or watch on YouTube. Just search for Here for the History.

59:07I'm Simon Jack. I'm Zing Zing. And on Good Bad Billionaire, we're exploring the life and fortune of music megastar Sir Paul McCartney. Macca. As one of the primary songwriters in The Beatles And with an extensive solo career His work generates vast and continuous royalty streams But were song royalties alone enough to break the billion? And earn him the title of the first British billionaire rock star? Find out in Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service Listen now, search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts