Marie-Guillemine Benoist

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Marie-Guillemine Benoist
Self-portrait Copying David's Belisarius [fr], 1786 (Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe)
Born(1768-12-18)December 18, 1768
Paris, France
DiedOctober 8, 1826(1826-10-08) (aged 57)
Paris, France
NationalityFrench
Known forPainting
MovementNeoclassicism
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1793)​
Musée du Louvre
.

Marie-Guillemine Benoist, born Marie-Guillemine Laville-Leroux (December 18, 1768 – October 8, 1826), was a French neoclassical, historical, and genre painter.

Biography

Benoist was born in Paris,[1] the daughter of a civil servant. Her training as an artist began in 1781 under Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and she entered Jacques-Louis David's atelier in 1786 along with her sister Marie-Élisabeth Laville-Leroux.

Benoist first exhibited in the Exposition de la Jeunesse in 1784, showing a portrait of her father and two pastel studies of heads. She continued to exhibit at the Exposition until 1788.[2] The poet Charles-Albert Demoustier, who met her in 1784, was inspired by her in creating the character Émilie in his work Lettres à Émilie sur la mythologie (1801).

In 1791, Benoist exhibited for the first time at the

Paris Salon, displaying her mythology-inspired picture Psyché faisant ses adieux à sa famille. Another of her paintings of this period, L'Innocence entre la vertu et le vice, is similarly mythological and reveals her feminist interests—in this picture, vice is represented by a man, although it was traditionally represented by a woman. In 1793, she married the lawyer Pierre-Vincent Benoist [fr
].

Her work, reflecting the influence of

University of Maryland, declared that "the painting is an anomaly because it presents a black person as the sole aestheticized subject and object of a work of art."[4] The picture was acquired by Louis XVIII
for France in 1818.

An important commission for a full-length portrait of

Napoléon Bonaparte—Premier Consul Français in this period—was awarded to her in 1803. This portrait was to be sent to the city of Ghent, newly ceded to France by the Treaty of Lunéville
in 1801. Other honors came to her; she was awarded a Gold Medal in the Salon of 1804, and received a governmental allowance. During this time she opened an atelier for the artistic training of women.

Her career was harmed by political developments, however, when her husband, the supporter of royalist causes, Comte Benoist, was nominated in the

Conseil d'État during the post-1814 Bourbon Restoration. Despite being at the height of her popularity, "she was obliged to abandon painting"[5]
and pursuing women's causes, due in part to her devoir de réserve ("tactful withdrawal") in the face of the growing wave of conservatism in European society.

Her last entry to the Salon was in 1812. She died at age 70 in Paris in 1826, having painted few items in the years before this.[2]

Works

Gallery

See also

References

  1. ISBN 978-0714878775. {{cite book}}: |last1= has generic name (help
    )
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-0-87587-073-1
    .
  3. ^ Matthew Robinson (26 March 2019). "French masterpieces renamed after black subjects". CNN. Retrieved 26 February 2021.
  4. ^ Constance Grady (19 June 2018). "The meaning behind the classical paintings in Beyonce and Jay-Z's 'Apeshit'". Vox. Retrieved 26 February 2021.
  5. doi:10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.t007939
  6. ISSN 0261-3077
    . Retrieved 26 March 2019.

Bibliography

  • Marie-Juliette Ballot, Une élève de David, La Comtesse Benoist, L'Émilie de Demoustier, 1768-1826, Plon, Paris, 1914
  • Astrid Reuter, Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist, Gestaltungsräume einer Künstlerin um 1800, Lukas Verlag, Berlin, 2002

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marie-Guillemine Benoist.
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