Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was one of the fine artists who exhibited great talent for art, and because of her, a horde of other women “wished to buy themselves with painting although they should only occupy themselves with embroidering the sword-belts and caps of the police,” delved into the ocean of artistry and started painting. Though she exhibited a path for the upcoming women artists in France, there was another problem they faced; the Societe des Arts voted that the female citizens would not get admission to their institute. Yet despite such exclusion of women artists from the institutions and the fact that they were to be denied on getting admission to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and Class of Fine Arts of the Institute until almost the end of the nineteenth century, they studied craft under less favorable conditions and made progress. In the 1800s alone, there was an increasing number of women artists, participating in the exhibitions. In 1801 Salon, out of 390 painters who exhibited, 14.1% were women, which increased in 1835 when out of 801 painters, 22.2% were women. This percentage further increased in the first third of the nineteenth century. Even though it was difficult to generalize about such a diverse group of painters, it is safe to conclude that the portrait genre, though relatively unprestigious, was the most popular among women artists; indeed, early in the century, critics recognized the “Happy Fecundity” of women artists as portraitists. Another painting genre, which is popular with women artists is the “sentimental genre” which includes intimate, often domestic, scenes of heart-warming pleasure, etc. There were very few history paintings done by women artists and there were a few women artists who got involved in the great Napoleonic pictorial propaganda machine. One of the artists who was involved in the Napoleonic pictorial propaganda and did portraiture, genre art, and history paintings was Marie-Guillemine Benoist. But as the Napolean Government fell, the artist’s husband, Pierre-Vincent Benoist received a higher job as Conseiller d’Etat in the Restoration government, and due to this, Benoist’s career was diminished. It’s because his position required that his wife withdraw from the further public exhibitions of her work. Today in this article, we will learn about the career of Benoist and thereby reflect on the socio-economic lives of women artists as well.
Marie-Guillemine Benoist | Fast Knowledge
Marie Guillemine Benoist (1768-1826) is one of the finest Neoclassicism painters from France who studied under Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Jacques-Louis David. She is best known for her portraits Portrait du Baron Larrey and Portrait d’une négresse.
Artist’s Abstract: Marie-Guillemine Benoist.
Known as the author of the Portrait of a Negress in the Louvre, Marie-Guillemine Benoist was one of the most distinguished artists among French women artists. Being a student of Jacques-Louis David, she did portraits, genre scenes, and even history scenes but she abandoned the history paintings in the late 1790s as she received excessive criticism for that. As a child of a government official, she began studying with Vigée Le Brun in 1791 and her earliest works were pastel portraits. But in her late works, her style was much more influenced by a great Neoclassical painter, Jacques-Louis David, whom she trained after Vigée Le Brun. Under the influence of David, Marie Benoist started producing more ambitious works like two history paintings, which she exhibited in the Salon of 1791. Napolean commissioned her to paint portraits of himself and his family for which she received an annual stipend from the government and a gold medal in 1804. It was only in the early 1800s that Marie Benoist switched to sentimental scenes of family life, which were in popular demand among middle-class patrons. When she was at the height of her fame, she stopped participating in public exhibitions, which ended her career due to her husband’s promotion to a high position in the Restoration Government.
| Artist | Marie-Guillemine Benoist |
| Birth | 1768 |
| Death | 1826 |
| Nationality | French |
| Genre | Portraiture, History, and Genre Paintings |
| Period | Neoclassicism |
| Famous Paintings | Portrait du baron Larrey And Portrait d’une négresse |
Reading About the Life of the Artist.
Born in Paris, Marie-Guillemine Leroulx de la Ville was the daughter of an administrative official and had a middle-class belonging. (Benoist was the married name of the artist). Her father was a civil servant who failed in the business but he encouraged both of his daughters to earn their own way through education- an attitude which was unusual in the eighteenth century. Marie first studied under Vigée Le Brun in 1781 or 1782 and exhibited her first works- A Portrait of Her Father and two pastel studies of her heads in 1784 at the Exposition de la Jeunesse where she continued to exhibit through 1788. It was under Jacques-Louis David’s tutelage that Marie qualified as an artist, a move censured by the King’s Directeur des Batiments, Comte d’Angiviller, as the Louvre forbade training young women artists. I have already told you in the introduction how young women artists were supposed to learn from outside as they were not allowed to be institutionalized.
Now, as Marie Guillemine Leroulx de la Ville left Vigée Le Brun and started learning from Jacques-David, she abandoned the pastel colors and softer modeling for more linear draftsmanship with brilliant color usage. Her first history paintings, became a sensation as they were exhibited at the Salon of 1791- Innocence Between Virtue and Vice and The Farewell of Psyche, and they both were so skillfully performed that few critics believed that David might have helped her in the execution.
Marie married the royalist, Pierre Vincent Benoist in 1793. Due to his anti-revolutionary activities, she was apparently prevented from participating in the Salon of 1793. However, at the Salon of 1795, she exhibited two portraits with a depiction of Sappho (her last painting of an antique subject). From 1802, she exhibited sentimental genre scenes of children or women with children at the Salons, which were then extremely popular. In 1803 or 1804, Marie Benoist received her first official commission to paint Napoleon’s portrait for the Palais de Justice at Ghent, and later she obtained further commissions for the emperor and his family. In 1804, she was awarded a gold medal for her work and founded a studio for women, about which little is known. Her last exhibition was at the Salon of 1812, and she painted a few pieces before her death in 1826 in Paris.
A Brief Look at Some of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Paintings.
1. Innocence Between Virtue and Vice, 1790.
In 1791, Marie-Guillemine Benoist exhibited one of her most ambitious paintings whose execution and conception were highly praised by critics, The Innocence Between Virtue and Vice. Earlier, in two genre paintings, Clarissa at the Home of Archer and Morden at the House of Clarissa inspired by Richardson’s Clarissa, Benoist already explored the theme of seduction and its consequences, which she exhibited at the Exposition de la Jeunesse in 1787 and 1788, respectively. However, in this artwork, she conveys morality by elevating the subject of innocence to an abstract, allegorical plane. Marie shows a great combination of bright colors on the figures. The artwork has a subtle drama, stark contrasts, shadows, and a better perspective with a resemblance to Jacques Louis David’s style.
The painting’s theme is taken from Hercules at the Crossroads, a subject which was quite popular in the eighteenth century by the Early of Shaftesbury’s commentary on the topic. Benoist portrayed this allegorical scene showing the handsome man whom the lady Innocence reluctantly rejects.
2. Madame Philippe Panon Desbassayns de Richemont.
The painting portrays Madame Philippe in her youth with her child. Sitting in a side pose with her face towards the viewer, she wears a long white dress with an olive green ribbon around her bust. The portrait shows Jeanne Eglé Fulcrande Catherine Mourgue, called Egle, and her son. It was probably exhibited at the Salon of 1802. She married into the Desbassayns family in 1799. From the late seventeenth century until 1848, they ran an extensive enslaved labor force on the island of La Réunion, about 450 miles from Madagascar, where they made a large fortune from their sugar and coffee plantations.
In 1918, Berwind acquired the artwork as a David, which was one of the many instances in which women’s paintings were attributed to their more famous male counterparts.
3. Portrait of Madeleine.
It was Marie Benoist’s Portrait of Madeleine, acquired by Louis XVIII later on, which established the artist’s reputation after it depicted a stunning black woman dressed in a white gown and turban. This subject sits on an armchair with her body oriented to her left but her face is turned to the right as if it sees the viewer. Her expressions are sober and filled with self-possession. Most of her hair is covered with a white headwrap while she wears a brilliant white dress, slipping from her shoulder to reveal her right breast. In her background, there is a plain beige field but there is a trim on her chair suggesting a well-furnished interior. There is a resemblance to the subject’s costume in the painting of Jacques-Louis David’s portrait, Madame Raymonde de Verninac.
Marie Benoist didn’t give her sitter’s name to protect the privacy of the sitter. The French mainland did not allow slavery prior to the French Revolution, and King Louis X decreed that France signified freedom in the early fourteenth century, so all slaves brought to France were freed. Hence, the sitter in the portrait got a scholarship here.
4. Portrait of Felice Baciocchi.
The Portrait of Felice Baciocchi is a mesmerizing composition by Marie-Guillemine Benoist that portrays Felice Baciocchi, a French general who married Napoleon’s younger sister, Elisa Maria Bonaparte. Felice wears a bright costume with his sight towards the viewer as he holds a rolled document in his left hand and a fiery cap in his right hand. While he stands in an eloquent posture, his right leg steps forward, and the left leg stands on its heel with an elevation. The background of the artwork is a plain dark wall with a contrasting wall sculpture and checkered floor. There is pride in the image of Felice Baciocchi with a subtle expression.
5. Self-Portrait, 1786.
The painting dates back to 1786, representing Marie Benoist wearing a loose white garment belted with red, with her shoulder exposed in a manner that directly anticipated a number of her later works. She wore a relaxed dress, especially compared to the self-portraits of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, exhibited in 1783 and 1785 in the Louvre Salon (figs. 3-5) – which made use of the often porous border between portraits of women painters and allegories of painting.
Benoist painted herself beautifully, with a blush over her cheeks as she stared at the viewer with delightfulness. One of her hands holds a bunch of paintbrushes while the other paints a face on the canvas. There is a subtle contrast through colors and softness in this portraiture.
6. The Farewell of Psyche to Her Family.
The Farewell of Psyche to Her Family is an oil on canvas painting with a size of 111 x 145 centimeters. An ethereal woman wears a white dress and raises one arm in the air as she separates from mournful figures wearing classical attire. The image then further depicts two couples of women standing hand-in-hand, another figure praying, and a crowned man holding his face. Behind this group of figures, the background includes gloomy rocky crags and a clouded sky. The mood of the picture is rather distressed and dark. In Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell, Marie Benoist chose a more obscure scene. Her version depicts Psyche embracing her tearful mother as her father, the King, stands by holding his head. To save the kingdom of her family, Psyche must marry a monster on a desolate rock, abandoning herself to a life of slavery.
This painting, depicting The Farewell of Psyche to her Family, had last been seen publicly in 1791, during the debut of the painter Marie-Guillemine Benoist. The presiding auction house in Bordeaux estimated a hammer price of 45,000 to 60,000 euros, a reasonable enough guess for a little-known woman artist whose last auctioned canvas had garnered 114,884 euros in 2004 but it instead hammered in at 362,080 euros.
Final Words.
The subject choices of Marie-Guillemine Benoist are inevitable. At first, she started with history paintings, which sooner changed to portraits, and then to the middle-class genre paintings. As a woman painter who rarely studied in well-known academic institutions and relied on training from outside, Marie Benoist’s paintings are much beyond technical perfection.
Her paintings usually revolved around the choice of her exceptional subjects and the excellence in colors and brushstrokes resembling the powerful era of Neoclassicism.
Resources.
- Women Artists, 1550-1950 by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin.
- Women Artists: An Illustrated History by Nancy Heller.
- America Collects Eighteenth-Century French Painting by Philippe Bordes, Jack Hinton, Melissa Hyde, Yuriko Jackall, Joseph J Rishel, and Pierre Rosenberg.
- Featured Image: The Fortune Teller by Marie-Guillemine Benoist; Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Frequently Asked Questions.
Marie-Guillemine Benoist is known for her artistic career during the French Revolution and portrait commissions in the Napoleonic regime. Besides, she was the first woman artist who exhibited history painting at the Paris Salon.
The Portrait of Madeleine is an oil-on-canvas painting, also known as Portrait of a Black Woman (French: Portrait d’une femme noire or Portrait d’une negresse) composed by Marie-Guillemine Benoist. Being trained by two excellent artists, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, and Jacques Louis David, Marie Benoist painted this portrait at the end of her career.
The Portrait of Madeleine hangs in the Louvre in the gallery, which is dedicated to the excellent artist Jacques Louis David and his students.
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