Vigée Le Brun

25 Jun, 2026 750 Painting

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the French portrait painter Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (1755 - 1842). From her teens she delighted her high society subjects in and around Paris, notably Marie Antoinette who she painted around 30 times, and she invariably found ways to show her sitters at their best. Some critics were affronted that she, a young woman, dared paint at all and, when they saw how good her portraits were, some spread a rumour that surely this could not really be her work and she must have had a secret male lover finishing her portraits in a studio. The French Revolution forced Vigee Le Brun out of France and so she set off from one European court to another to find more success from Naples to Vienna to St Petersburg and to London, eventually settling back in France. Today her works are on show in major galleries around the world.

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Guests

  • Rosalind Polly Blakesley No other episodes
    Master of Pembroke College and Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge
  • Robert Wenley No other episodes
    Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham
  • Francesca Whitlum-Cooper No other episodes
    Curator of Later Italian, Spanish and French Paintings at The National Gallery, London.

Reading list

  • Vigee Le Brun
    Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer and Paul Lang (eds) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016) Google Books →
  • Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun: 1755-1842
    Joseph Baillio et al. (Grand Palais, Paris, 2015/16)
  • Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great
    Rosalind P. Blakesley (Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2023) Google Books →
  • Vigee Le Brun: Self Portrait in a Straw Hat
    Lucy Davies (National Gallery Global, 2025) Google Books →
  • The Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun
    Angelica Goodden (Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1997) Google Books →
  • Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun: The Entwined Lives of Two Great Eighteenth-Century Women Artists
    Franny Moyle (Apollo, 2025) Google Books →
  • Daring: The Life and Art of Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun
    Jordana Pomeroy (Getty Publications, 2025) Google Books →
  • The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art
    Mary D. Sheriff (University of Chicago Press, 1997) Google Books →
  • A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830
    Paris Spies-Gans (Paul Mellon Centre, Yale University Press London, 2022) Google Books →
  • The Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun
    Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (trans. Sian Evans) (Camden Press, 1989) Google Books →
  • Souvenirs de Madame Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun
    Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (Tredition Classics, first published 1869; 2012) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m002y1gt

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002y1gt

Auto-category: 759.4 (Painting—France)