# Vigée Le Brun

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-with-melvyn-bragg-1437027/vig-e-le-brun
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-with-melvyn-bragg-1437027/vig-e-le-brun.md
Podcast: [In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg](https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-with-melvyn-bragg-1437027)
Published: 2026-07-23T09:15:00+00:00
Episode link: https://iono.fm/e/1699464
Audio file: https://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/6/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download-rss/proto/https/vpid/p0ntls0h.mp3?p=rss
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/in-our-time-with-melvyn-bragg-1437027/episodes/vig-e-le-brun
Duration seconds: 3501

## Resource

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the French portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée 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 Vigée 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. With Rosalind Polly Blakesley Master of Pembroke College and Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge Robert Wenley Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham And Francesca Whitlum-Cooper Curator of Later Italian, Spanish and French Paintings at The National Gallery, London. Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer and Paul Lang (eds), Vigée Le Brun (exhibition catalogue in English, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016) Joseph Baillio et al., Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun: 1755-1842 (exhibition catalogue in French, Grand Palais, Paris, 2015/16) Rosalind P. Blakesley, Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great (Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2023), especially chapter 8 ‘The Triumphant Refugee’ Lucy Davies, Vigée Le Brun: Self Portrait in a Straw Hat (National Gallery Global, 2025) Angelica Goodden, The Sweetn…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/in-our-time-with-melvyn-bragg-1437027/episodes/vig-e-le-brun/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-with-melvyn-bragg-1437027/vig-e-le-brun.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.