Marie Guillelmine Benoist (1768–1826)

• Was a French neoclassical, historical and genre painter.
• Her training as an artist began in 1781 under Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
• She entered Jacques-Louis David's atelier in 1786 along with her sister Marie-Élisabeth Laville-Leroux.
• When her husband, the supporter of royalist causes, Comte Benoist, was nominated in the Conseil d'État during the post-1814 Bourbon Restoration.
• Despite being at the height of her popularity, "she was obliged to abandon painting" and pursuing women's causes, due in part to her devoir de réserve or "tactful withdrawal" in English, in the face of the growing wave of conservatism in European society.
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