Madeleine la Belle

The Paris Salon of 1800:

A smallish (‎81 × 65 cm) portrait of a woman should not have been a surprise in such surroundings, but on the Louvre's walls  appeared an image unlike any other by the hand of a woman, Marie-Guillemine Benoist (née Laville-Leroulx, 1768-1826), student of David, who made her living by her brush - but this entry is not her story, fascinating though that may be.

Let us turn rather to her work here itself, a captivating portrayal of a Black woman, first by setting the scene.

Nine years before, in 1791, the slaves of Saint Domingue, today's Haiti, had risen up to reclaim their freedom, thereby triggering one of the French Revolution's most glorious moments for the new Republic had abolished slavery 4 février 1794. Here, the white of the sitter's dress, complemented by the red of her belt and the blue of the chair she sits upon seem to hearken to the ideals the tricolor stands for: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (In two short years from her exposition in the Salon slavery will be reestablished by Napoleon in the islands that were her home).

She has but recently been given back her name by Anne Lafont, "Une Africaine au Louvre" (2019) who identfies her as Madeleine, a Guadeloupe native, servant in the household of the brother-in-law of the painter, perhaps a former bondswoman who had but recently gained her freedom.

Others have noted that Benoist robbed her of her name, presenting her as an anonymous sitter. Yet portraits of white woman were also often hung without a signifier of identity. As a Black woman, the painter could not submit her work under the habitual title of "portrait of a lady," given the socio-economic status of Blacks in France at that period. Presumably for this reason she named it "Portrait d'une Négresse." The startling appellation shocks our sensibilities but the title would more properly translate in today's terms to "Portrait of a Black Woman."

I had a very gifted student who presented a fine paper on this painting, but balked at the visible breast as a derogatory commentary on the part of the painter. Certainly it could, and likely does, refer to the naked black flesh dehumanized at the auction blocks in the overseas colonies of her origin.

Still, a long tradition of showing single breast as sign of beauty, from first French royal mistress Agnès Sorel 

to Raphael’s La Fornarina 

Any number of miniatures (and so for a highly restricted circle of viewers, unlike the Salon, it is true) contemporary to this portray white women showing a voluptuous bosom, in part or in whole, as metonymically signifying their beauty.

And she is beautiful in her own right. Not that the period's critical reception viewed her so. She was referred to as a "stain" by one conservative critic, while another contrasted the "pretty white hand" of the painter with this "noirceur" or "blackness" of her creation.

Traditionally in European art, Black handmaidens appear next to white women to highlight an alabaster complexion and hence the attraction of the sitter – we might think of Titian’s Acteon Surprising Diana at her Bath 

or of Manet’s Olympia 

Here, however, it is the whiteness of Madeleine's dress and headgear that serve as complement to an ebony skin that glows with inner light – it is this complexion, along with the eyes and expression- that animate the image, that draw in the viewer and take center stage. 

It has been suggested that this undeniable beauty makes of her a product for male consumption, an object of luxury to be owned, a state not so far removed from that of slavery.

I would say, however, that they way in which she looks out at the viewer, interrogating and addressing both artist and spectator with confidence and self-posession  - her psychological presence, her reality- render this point moot. If that had indeed been the painter's goal, Madeleine herself has upended it. 

And although we must admit that we don't know what Benoist's aim might have been (my reading is more sympathetic than James Small's) we must admit as well that this very personalized rendering of the sitter points more towards a proper portrait rather than a model's servile work of posing for a set piece. In which case Madeleine is in the habitual place of a white woman dominating the painter who, as servant in turn, commemorates her living likeness.

Anne Lafont, Une Africaine au Louvre en 1800 : la place du modèle, Paris, Institut national d'histoire de l'art, 2019, 60 p. (ISBN 978-2-917902-51-6).

James Smalls, “Slavery is a Woman: ‘Race,’ Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist’s Portrait d’une négresse (1800),” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 3, no. 1 (Spring 2004), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring04/286-slavery-is-a-woman-race-gender-and-visuality-in-marie-benoists-portrait-dune-negresse-1800 (accessed September 22, 20)

Dr. Susan Waller, "Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Madeleine," in Smarthistory, September 26, 2018, accessed September 22, 2020