"Madame Desbassayns de Richemont and Her Son," Marie Benoist, 1802.

Benoist (1768-1826) was a French Neoclassical painter and portraitist, a student of the great portraitist Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, and also a protegee of Jacques-Louis David....to whom this portrait was mistakenly attributed for years.

She was one of a number of women artists in France just after the Revolution who exhibited to the public for the first time; before then exhibitions by women artists were rare. Benoist thrived in that environment, and one fame for her "Portrait of Madeleine," of a Black woman, the first time a Black woman had been portrayed as the aesthetic center of a Western work of art.

Jeanne Egle Fulcrand Catherine Mourgue married into the wealthy Desbassayns family, whose immense fortune came from sugar and coffee plantations on Reunion, in the Indian Ocean. There's a certain charm in her simple Empire dress and the curious toddler climbing into her lap.

Benoist sadly withdrew from the art world in 1814, at the height of her popularity, due to her husband's involvement in Royalist causes and the growing wave of conservatism in Europe of the time.

Happy Portrait Monday!

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

#Art #PortraitMonday #MarieBenoist #Neoclassicism

"Self-Portrait," Marie Benoist, 1786.

Marie-Guillemine Benoist (1768-1826) was obviously very talented, having painted this while only in her teens. And she went on to be an acclaimed neoclassical and historic painter. She was initially trained under Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and later under Jacques-Louis David, so she had guidance from some of the top talent of her day.

She became an in-demand portraitist, and even had commissions from Napoleon Bonaparte himself. She enjoyed quite a big of success...until the Bonaparte era crumbled. In the face of growing conservatism in Europe, she tactfully retired from public life and only rarely painted.

I love the energy depicted here...it's so obviously the work of someone very young and very excited and confident.

From the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.

#Art #SelfPortrait #NeoClassicism #MarieBenoist #WomenAritsts #WomenInArt