Rare painting by groundbreaking French artist Marie-Guillemine Benoist acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Mar 22, 2022

Painting of group of people in dressed in robes, embracing and praying

Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell, 1791. Oil on canvas, 43 3/4 x 57 1/8 in. (111 x 145 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn; Phoebe Cowles and Robert Girard; Margaret and William R. Hearst III; Diane B. Wilsey; Barbara A. Wolfe; The Jay and Clara McEvoy Trust; The Michael Taylor Trust; The Margaret Oakes Endowment Income Fund; The Harris Family; Ariane and Lionel Sauvage; and an anonymous donor, 2022.2

Rare painting by groundbreaking French artist Marie-Guillemine Benoist acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO—In 1791 artist Marie-Guillemine Benoist set out to defy expectations, to prove to all of Paris that a woman could indeed “compose history paintings.” Exhibiting Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell at that year’s Salon, the official exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, she became the first woman to show a history painting—that is, a scene from literature, mythology, history, or the Bible—in the great exhibition, marking the recognition of artists among their peers. La Béquille de Voltaire au Salon*, 1791 states: “I thought that women were hardly capable of composing history paintings, above all to this degree of perfection”.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are thrilled to announce the acquisition of Benoist’s groundbreaking work, a rare painting still in existence from her early Neoclassical period—one of just three paintings by the artist held in US public collections today. Hidden away for centuries in a private collection, this painting will be exhibited in public for the first time since the Salon of 1791 at the Legion of Honor.

“We are delighted to have acquired this outstanding and historically significant work by the path-breaking female artist Marie-Guillemine Benoist for our collection of European paintings,” states Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “We extend our gratitude to the group of patrons who stepped forward to enable this acquisition, which will substantially enrich the story that we tell about the Neoclassical movement and the Revolutionary period in our galleries, where it will join paintings by Benoist’s mentors Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun and Jacques-Louis David.”

Providing a fresh perspective on a time-honored tale, Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell offers a glimpse of the utopian possibilities that the French Revolution promised—but would not quite deliver—for women artists. While the romance of Cupid and Psyche offered Benoist’s male contemporaries a pretext to paint graceful, ephebic nudes, she herself selected an earlier and more unusual chapter from the same story: a wrenching family drama in which the princess Psyche, dressed in white, embraces her mother before her parents abandon her on a desolate rock. According to prophecy, the princess is doomed to marry a creature of immeasurable destructive power, and so, to save her father’s kingdom, she must be sacrificed to the monster. Drawn from the second-century Roman writer Apuleius, by way of the eighteenth-century French poet Charles Demoustier, the episode illustrates personal and familial sacrifice for the public good: an apposite theme in the Revolutionary era.

“Having remained with the descendants of its first owner for over 200 years, the painting is magnificently preserved, allowing us to appreciate Benoist’s exquisite attention to detail. Note the tears that glisten on the queen’s cheek, the gleaming tendrils of Psyche’s hair, the flutter and weight of her draperies, the glow of pearls against flesh,” adds Emily Beeny, Curator in Charge of European Paintings.

According to the Royal Academy, whose members had been the only artists permitted to exhibit at the Salon since its founding over a century before, women might aspire to join the Academy and exhibit at the Salon solely as painters of still life or portraits—genres regarded as essentially imitative and therefore intellectually inferior. But history painting was considered the preserve of men: a genre intended to commemorate heroic deeds and showcase the artist’s powers of invention. In 1791, the Revolution flung open the doors of the Salon to artists unaffiliated with the Academy, making it possible for Benoist to submit her work.

Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell will be on view in Gallery 16 at the Legion of Honor beginning March 24, 2022.

The acquisition was made possible by John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn, Phoebe Cowles and Robert Girard, Margaret and William R. Hearst III, Diane B. Wilsey, Barbara A. Wolfe, the Jay and Clara McEvoy Trust, the Michael Taylor Trust, the Margaret Oakes Endowment Income Fund, the Harris Family, Ariane and Lionel Sauvage, and an anonymous donor.

*1791 official exhibition catalogue and review by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts

About Marie-Guillemine Benoist
Born Marie-Guillemine La Ville Leroulx, Benoist received her early training in the studio of Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, a successful portraitist and a rare female member of the Royal Academy. But when Vigée-Le Brun closed her teaching studio, Benoist switched to that of Jacques-Louis David, then emerging as the greatest history painter of the age and the teacher of a whole Neoclassical generation (including Girodet, Gérard, Gros, and Ingres). One of just three female pupils in David’s studio, Benoist quickly adopted her teacher’s tight, hard facture and taste for classical antiquity, as her Psyche demonstrates, with its mythological subject, antique dress, and austere, sculptural frieze of figures.

Benoist would exhibit only a tiny handful of history paintings at the Salon, however. The need to support her family forced the artist to go on to paint almost solely commissioned portraits. An important commission for a full-length portrait of Napoléon Bonaparte was awarded to her in 1803. Other honors included a Gold Medal in the Salon of 1804, and a governmental allowance. In the early 19th century, she opened an atelier for the artistic training of women, but a decade later when her husband ascended to high office in the Restoration government, Benoist was forced to give up her artistic career entirely.

Only a handful of Benoist’s works are known today, most of them portraits. The most important of these is the Portrait of Madeleine, 1800, acquired by the Musée du Louvre in 1818. Other examples of her work in the United States are the Portrait of Madame Philippe Panon Desbassayns de Richemont and Her Son Eugène 1802, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Portrait of a Lady, at the San Diego Museum of Art. Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell is the only history painting by Benoist in a US public collection.

Visiting \ Legion of Honor
Lincoln Park, 100 34th Avenue, San Francisco. The museum is open Tuesday–Friday, noon–5:15 pm, and Saturday–Sunday 9:30 am–5:15 pm, with free general admission to Bay Area residents every Saturday, and free admission to all every first Tuesday of the month. Go to legionofhonor.org/visit-us for more information.

About the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco oversee the de Young, located in Golden Gate Park, and the Legion of Honor, in Lincoln Park. The Fine Arts Museums’ rich collection of European paintings is presented throughout the Beaux-Arts architecture of the Legion of Honor’s galleries. The collection includes more than 800 masterpieces from the 14th to the early 20th centuries. The approximately 250 paintings on view present a survey of artistic accomplishments by Europe’s leading masters, from Fra Angelico to Claude Monet.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco respectfully acknowledge the Ramaytush Ohlone, the original inhabitants of what is now the San Francisco Peninsula, and acknowledge that the greater Bay Area is the ancestral territory of the Miwok, Yokuts, Patwin, and other Ohlone. Indigenous communities have lived in and moved through this place over hundreds of generations, and Indigenous peoples from many nations make their home in this region today. Please join us in recognizing and honoring their ancestors, descendants, elders, and communities.

Media Inquiries
Helena Nordstrom, Director of Communications \ hnordstrom@famsf.org \ 415.465.3531