Slavery is a Woman

Slavery is a Woman:
Race, Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist’s Portrait d’une négresse (1800)
By James Smalls

Hanging on one wall of the Musée du Louvre, in the company of the gargantuan machines by Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, and others, is an exquisitely crafted and modestly sized painting of a black woman. She is shown seated, half-draped, with her right breast bared to the viewer. She sports an intricately wrapped and crisply laundered headdress that appears similar in fabric to the garment she gathers closely against her body just below her breasts. She stares out at the viewer with an enigmatic expression. Although there are no background details that indicate precisely where the sitter is placed, certain details of her physical surroundings—namely, the ancien régime chair and luxurious cloth that drapes both it and her—suggest that she is in a well-to-do domestic space.

Portrait d’une négresse (fig. 1) was painted in 1800 by Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist (born Marie-Guillemine Leroulx-Delaville) (1768-1826), a woman of aristocratic lineage who belonged to a small elite circle of professional women painters that included, among others, Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818), Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842), Marguerite Gérard (1771-1837), Angélique Mongez (1775-1855), and Adélaide Labille-Guiard (1749-1803).1 As had been the case with most women artists working at the time, Benoist fit the middle and upper class ideal of “womanhood” in her conforming to the social expectations of women to marry, raise children, and forego a career.”2

Although we do not know whether or to what extent Benoist partook in the volatile debates on slavery and gender current during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in France, her painting may be seen as a voice of protest, however small, in the discourse over human bondage. With the portrait, the artist responded to early nineteenth-century French racialism and the less-than-desirable treatment of women by playing upon the popular analogy of women and slaves. The portrait is interesting not just in its aesthetic presentation and historical context, but in its potential for new critical readings. In the following pages, I want to consider Benoist’s portrait as a work far more nuanced and layered in signification around race, gender, and class issues than previous assessments of the work have led us to believe.3 I would like to present a reading of the painting based upon a consideration of its racialized and gendered subject matter and style, as well as the gender and social class status of the artist, the historical circumstance surrounding the work’s creation, and the multi-directional dynamics of “race” and visuality communicated through the portrait. To this end, my approach will deviate at times from standard modes of art-historical inquiry and venture into a critical evaluation of the painting as a constructed image of “race” and gender. Before doing so, however, certain biographical and historical bits of information must be revealed that inform my unconventional interpretation of the painting.

Circumstances

The acknowledgement and delineation of historical circumstances have always been critical for contextualizing treatments of race and gender in art. The Portrait d’une négresse was painted in 1800—after the emancipation decree of 1794 in which slaves in the French colonies were (temporarily) liberated and slavery was abolished, but before the reinstatement of colonial slavery by Napoléon Bonaparte in 1802. So the period in which Benoist’s portrait was fashioned was one in which the heroicized black image enjoyed considerable popularity in France.4 It has been suggested that Benoist might have executed the work as a tribute to the 1794 emancipation, combining it with the rise of a short-lived feminist movement in France, thereby effectively linking the issues of slavery and the condition of women.5 Of course, all hopes for black and female emancipation were dashed with the reinstitution of slavery in 1802 and with the appearance of the Code Napoléon in 1804, the latter of which imposed harsh social and legal restrictions on women and the former on black immigration into France.6

Benoist’s concerns with the status of women and their link to colonial blacks evolved as a result of developments that impacted her life, a life that reads like a suspense novel. She was born into an established family of government administrators and politicians from Brittany. Her father, René Leroulx-Delaville, entered the government administration around 1764. In 1782, he was named director of Louis XVI’s saltworks and was subsequently assigned to another government post. He took on several important positions including, in 1792, appointment as a minister in Louis XVI’s cabinet. Toward the end of his life, he was named French consul in Rotterdam, where he died in 1798. His brother, Joseph Leroulx-Delaville, was a member of the Assembly of Notables, Deputy of the Orient to the Estates General, and a member of the Constituent Assembly. Benoist’s husband, Pierre-Vincent Benoist (1758-1834), a lawyer and avowed monarchist from Angers, also came from an illustrious background. He was a member of the Constituent Assembly and fostered close royalist connections.7 Benoist’s marriage to Pierre-Vincent in 1793 further deepened her royalist ties and eventually forced her to become entangled, reluctantly, in the Revolution’s politics during its most radical phase in 1793-1794.8 Her close friendships with known monarchists and their sympathizers eventually proved potentially dangerous to her safety, so much so that in 1794 she and her husband were forced into hiding.9

It has been suggested that the Portrait d’une négresse was not commissioned but was painted on the artist’s own initiative, and was modeled after a black slave brought back to France by Benoist’s brother-in-law, a civil servant and ship’s purser who had returned from the French island of Guadeloupe in 1800.10 Africans and colonial blacks were frequently brought to Europe to work in upper class and middle class households and often appear in paintings “as part of a complex ritual of display of . . . the ostentatious wealth the bourgeoisie (and upper classes) accumulated through African slave labor on Caribbean plantations.”11 During the time in which Benoist’s portrait was painted, planters were allowed to bring slaves onto the French mainland where, legally, slavery had been forbidden since the Middle Ages. French law dictated that once transported onto continental French soil, a slave’s status had to be legally changed to that of servant or attendant and registered with the French authorities.12 In all likelihood, therefore, Benoist’s sitter was a slave-turned-servant who had no say in the way her body was presented. The artist, always eager to publicize her painting skills, enthusiastically began the task of putting on canvas the “belle couleur noire brillante” that she found by contrasting dark flesh and white cloth.

Portrait d’une négresse is an anomaly in Benoist’s oeuvre. Prior to 1800, the artist produced mostly portraits and genre scenes in pastels.13 She exhibited sentimental, moralizing portrayals of women, children, and family life which were, generally speaking, expected of women artists by the male-dominated art apparatus during the period and which were very popular with the middle class. Of all the works she exhibited between 1799 and 1804, most of which are lost to us now, Portrait d’une négresse was most highly praised by the Salon critics.14 The painting is unusual in that it deviates from standard representations of blacks in European art which typically show them as colorful additions to a portrait or a scene in which a white master or mistress is the intended primary focus. Most scholars agree that Benoist’s portrait was not a study for a larger project as is the case with most eighteenth-century works in which a sole black appears.

A recognized example of the standard representation of blacks in European art is provided by Jean-Marc Nattier’s 1733 Mademoiselle de Clermont at Her Bath Attended by Slaves (figs. 2 and 3).15 There, black women are shown in their expected roles as servants and exoticized complements to the white mistress. What is interesting about Portrait d’une négresse is that unlike the standard eighteenth-century painting in which a black appears, it does not show a white woman attended by a black one. However, Benoist’s painting does act out that scenario, as the black woman here serves the invisible white artist as a model. While traditional paintings of black and white women show the white woman posed as model on a chair and attended by blacks, such as in Nattier’s work, Benoist’s image reverses the situation—black woman is seated and posed as white woman is busy attending (painting). By depicting a black woman as exotic, servant or slave in the traditional pose and situation of white women, Benoist has turned the Portrait d’une négresse into something of an allegory of her own condition of subservience to patriarchy.

A contemporary art historian, Griselda Pollock, has noted that in Western art black women typically represent “a space in the text of a masculinist modernist culture in which flourishes an Orientalizing, Africanist fantasy that circulates between artists, their models, and contemporary art historians in the twentieth century.”16 Benoist’s image is intriguing in that it disrupts our perception of portraiture as a genre and should be read as a powerful demonstration of stylistic virtuosity used not only to construct racial otherness in the historical moment, but to relate that process to the assumed un-raced white and, in this case, female rather than male, self. In the process, black woman remains a nameless “negress” despite her individualized physiognomy. She mystifies rather than clarifies the expected function of the portrait genre as a marker of a sitter’s identity, social class standing, and occupation. Indeed, Portrait d’une négresse is less a portrait of a black woman and more a portrait of Benoist herself. And in this respect, it is a typical colonialist picture in that the artist who created it made use of the racialized Other to define and empower the colonizing Self. That is, the portrait constitutes a visual record of white woman’s construction and affirmation of self through the racial and cultural Other.

Benoist’s portrait is not only self-reflexive, but is dialogic in that it documents a desire by the artist to command both the aesthetic and the racial in the defining moment of the modern self. The image underscores the observation that national and cultural identities of artists who speak through and for the Other oftentimes “mark themselves and their objects of othering in specific terms of racial, gender, and class differences.”17 The portrait goes far to highlight the co-existence of “processes of identification and objectification, [of] mirroring and distancing.”18 In the Portrait d’une négresse the harsh reality of the enslaved condition of this particular black woman (and by extension, all black women) is concealed beneath a veneer of aestheticizing and classicizing. However, for all its aesthetic allure and charm, the portrait robs the black sitter of her identity, her voice, and her agency in order to make a statement about the social position and power (albeit limited in the sense of male-dominated politics of the day) of bourgeois and upper class white women at the beginning of the nineteenth century in France.

Benoist’s portrait gives credence to the observation that “those rendered Other are sacrificed to idealization [exoticism], excluded from the being of personhood, from social benefits, and from political (self) representation.”19 This process is underscored by the title Benoist gave to the portrait. Although the image depicts a specific individual, the artist has referred to her only as a négresse—the feminine counterpart of the generic racial designation nègre (Negro).20 Benoist’s prerogative not to name is not simply a result of the black woman’s race, for three years prior to the portrait, in 1797, the history painter Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767-1824) produced a striking portrait of a black man called Portrait du Citoyen Belley, ex-représentant des colonies (fig. 4).21 In the historical and art-historical literature, the portraits by Girodet and Benoist are often mentioned and illustrated in relation to one another and are recognized as rare images in that they showcase a single black figure as main focus of a work of art.22 They differ, however, in several respects. Unlike Benoist, Girodet depicts a named individual whose biography and physical presence relate directly to the postrevolutionary moment in which it was painted.23 Belley’s dignified yet defiant demeanor speaks directly to the historical circumstances of slavery, abolition, and the tumultuous relationship between the races in the French colonies. Although the exact relationship between Girodet and Belley remains a mystery, it is probable that Girodet’s purpose was to visually construct a personage who embodies the democratic ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity brought forth by the French Revolution and should be extended, in principle, to blacks. Portrait du Citoyen Belley is, according to historian Helen Weston, a combined allegorical and straightforward portrait containing elements of idealization and historical “truth.”24 Likewise, Benoist’s portrait taps into didactic strains of allegory while addressing historical truths regarding slavery and the less-than-desirable condition of women.

Whereas Belley is clothed in a uniform that identifies his rank and historical significance as diplomatic representative of black political interests in the colonies, Benoist’s negress is partially nude and resigned to her assigned role as slave/servant. In contradistinction to Girodet’s politically active black model, Benoist’s black woman has been denied individuality and agency. She has been “vacated” and then “filled in” by the artist with self-reflexive, opportunistic ideology that speaks to both Benoist’s prowess with the paintbrush and her command over not only the black body as object, but also, by extension, over black domestic labor.25 It is the absent and un-raced self outside the picture frame (i.e., Benoist herself as artist), who has freely exercised her power not to name and by doing so imagines and extends “power, control, authority and domination over a stand-in who she attempts to ‘liberate’.”26 In using the black female body as a sign of emancipation for all women, Benoist employs an operative series of struggles rendered in binary terms between feminine and masculine, between emotionalized aestheticism, passive domesticity and the desire for political expediency through portraiture as public action; between enslavement and liberty, black and white, stereotype and sympathy. In other words, I see in this portrait the “classic” ambiguity, struggle, and neurotic exchange of power played out between colonizer and colonized—a state of affairs that has become an all-too-expected feature of racial and cultural relations in the modern Western world.