自画像

Marie-Guillemine Benoist was 17 or 18 when she painted herself at the easel in 1786, and the moment mattered. That year she left the studio of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, then the most celebrated woman painter in France, and entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David, whose severe classical style would soon dominate the coming Revolution. She put both allegiances into the picture. The soft, flattering handling of her own face nods to Vigée Le Brun, while the canvas on the easel shows a study after David's Belisarius, the work she was copying to learn from him. It reads as a young woman announcing, in paint, exactly whose pupil she now intended to be. She would go on to exhibit at the Salon and run her own teaching studio for women.