Marie-Guillemine Benoist
Marie-Guillemine Benoist, born Marie-Guillemine Laville-Leroux, was a French neoclassical, historical, and genre painter.
Biography
Marie Guillemine Laville-Leroux was born in Paris, 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.She first exhibited in the in 1784, showing a portrait of her father and two pastel studies of heads. She continued to exhibit at the Exposition until 1788. 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.
In 1791, Laville-Leroux 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.
Her work, reflecting the influence of Jacques-Louis David, tended increasingly toward history painting by 1795. In 1800, Benoist exhibited Portrait d'une négresse in the Salon. Six years previously, slavery had been abolished, and this image became a symbol for women's emancipation and black people's rights. James Smalls, a professor of Art History at the 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." 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.
Her career was harmed by political developments, however, when her husband Comte Benoist, the supporter of royalist causes, 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" and pursue women's causes, due in part to her devoir de réserve in the face of the growing wave of conservatism in European society.
Her last entry to the Salon was in 1812. She died in Paris in 1826, having painted few items in the years before this.