Portrait of a Negress (French: Portrait d'une Négresse) is a painting by the French painter Marie-Guillemine Benoist. She painted the portrait around 1800, only six years after the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, at the time of the French Revolution. She broke the orientalist tradition of portraying colored people with exotic costumes and backgrounds. The painting thus symbolizes the emancipation of colored people. Benoist presented the portrait during the Parisian salon and received both promising and critical reactions. The work is currently in the Louvre in Paris. (Google translation of https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portret_van_een_negerin) 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 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, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Marguerite Gérard, Angélique Mongez, and Adélaide Labille-Guiard. 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." Although we do not know whether or to what extent Benoist partook in the volatile debates on slavery and gender current during the late 18th and early 19th 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 19th-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... (http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring04/70-spring04/spring04article/286-slavery-is-a-woman-race-gender-and-visuality-in-marie-benoists-portrait-dune-negresse-1800)