One of the best known portraits in the history of European art, Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Black Woman was created at a time when the so-called “black” skin was becoming a marker for racial difference for Africans in European culture. What did this unprecedented portrayal of a formerly enslaved woman from Guadeloupe mean for European viewers in 1800? How have art historians interpreted this enigmatic portrait, and how can we look at it differently?
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For Further Reading 📚📖
Cécile Bishop, “Portraiture, Race, and Subjectivity: The Opacity of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait d’une négresse,” Word & Image, vol. 35, no. 1 (2019), pp. 1-11
Mechthild Fend, “Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait d’une négresse and the Visibility of Skin Colour,” in Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone, edited by Caroline Rosenthal and Dirk Vanderbeke (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), pp. 192-210
Mechthild Fend, Fleshing out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650-1850 (Manchester University Press, 2016)
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (Yale University Press, 2002)
Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Harvard University Press, 1989), volume 4, part 1
Anne Lafont, “How Skin Color Became a Racial Marker: Art Historical Perspectives on Race,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 51, no. 1 (fall 2017), pp. 89-113
Amelia Rauser, The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s (Yale University Press, 2020)
Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, “Who Is the Subject? Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist’s Portrait d’une négresse,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, edited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 315-343
James Smalls, “Slavery Is a Woman: ‘Race,’ Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist’s Portrait d’une négresse (1800),” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol. 3, no. 1 (spring 2004)
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Helen Weston, “‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover’: LaVille-Leroulx’s Portrait de Négresse and the Signs of Misrecognition,” in Work and the Image: Work, Craft, and Labour, edited by Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock (Ashgate, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 53-74
Image/Video Credit 🖼🎥
THE CARTERS, “APES**T" / KZread / June 16, 2018 • THE CARTERS - APESHIT ...
Marie Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of a Black Woman, 1800 / Musée du Louvre / photo by Thierry Le Mage, © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
G. Devisme and Antoine Maxime Monsaldy, Vue des ouvrages de peinture des artistes vivants … en l’an VIII de la République française, 1800 / Bibliothèque nationale de France - modified
Marie Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Jeanne Eglé Mourgue and Her Son, 1802 / Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public Domain
Nicolas de Largillière, Woman and an Enslaved Servant, 1696 / Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public Domain
Jan Mijtend, Margaretha van Raephorst, 1668 / Rijksmuseum /Public Domain
Loi relative à la traite des Noirs et au régime des Colonies. Du 30 Floréal, an X de la République une et indivisible / photo by Sejan / CC BY-SA 3.0
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Jacques-Louis David, Madame Raymond de Verninac, 1798-99 / Musée du Louvre / Wikimedia Commons / photo by Sailko / CC BY-SA 3.0
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Agostino Brunias, Market Day, Roseau, Dominica, c. 1780 / Yale Center for British Art / Public Domain
Joseph Chinard, Bust of Madame Récamier. After 1801 / RISD Museum / Public Domain
Great Sphinx of Tanis, ca. 2600 BCE / Musée du Louvre / photo by Oh Paris / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0
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