Benoist Marie I

Description

“marie benoist“

When was the last time you looked into your letterbox and found personal mail? “A long time ago” you probably say. It is likely you yourself haven’t written any “snail mail” or postcards since the emergence of e-mail and electronic postcard services. Sending all your relatives Holiday Greetings with just one ‘click’ seemed so attractive. You even could make it ‘highly personalized’ with photo’s of you and your friends or your spouse and kids and send them over the internet. Or even better, order them to be printed and sent.

But that is not the same as picking up mail from the mailbox and while you walk back indulging your curiosity about “who wrote that lovely ‘wish’ – maybe even with an old-style fountain pen – on a postcard that delights the eye in such a way?” Experiencing the pleasure to place it in clear vision for the coming weeks, so the front and the back of that card will bring a smile on our face whenever it catches your attention again.

That will absolutely happen with cards featuring female painters. Their paintings can be found in museums like Louvre, Hermitage, National Gallery in London or Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There is a common denominator in most their stories, however, and that is experiencing opposition working in a man’s world.

Marie-Guillemine Laville-Leroulx (Benoist was her married name), daughter of a civil servant was lucky enough to have a father who firmly believed his daughters should be educated in such a way they could earn a living by themselves. Quite uncommon in those days. Marie and her sister first were trained by Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun in the Neo-Classical style; a style developed after excavations in Pompei. She became the ‘muse’ of the successful writer Demoustier and was the inspiration of one of his novel characters in Lettres à Emilie sur la mythologie. Later, Marie and her sister were allowed to work in the studio of Jacques-Louis David; a leading figure among Neo-classical painters. Unlike Vigée-Le Brun, Marie Benoist could exhibit at a young age at “Le Salon”; the official art annual or biennial exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Other successes are a commission for a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte(1804) and winning a gold medal at “Le Salon”(1803). It gave her a government pension. At that time she opened a studio exclusively for women, to whom she taught painting.

Already in 1795 she abandoned classical subjects and turned to genre painting. At the Salon of 1800 she presents Portrait d’une négresse (renamed to”Portrait to Madeleine” in 2019, See Benoist Marie II in this collection of cards). Shortly before that slavery in the French colonies was abolished (1794) for the first time under the influence of the French revolution. The painting is considered one of her masterpieces and is a manifesto for the emancipation of slaves and feminism.

In 1793 she married the banker and politician Pierre-Vincent Benoist. Her career seemed not to be hampered by this mariage until the restoration of the monarchy in 1815. The political career of her husband takes off in a wave of conservatism. She was forced to abandon painting, “pursue women’s causes” (raising her child) and not to overshadow her husband.

Specifications

• 4/4 full bleed
• 300 GSM
• Paper thickness: 0.13″ (0.34 mm)
• Laminated feel
• White matte back with a small QR code or a bar code