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Rare Painting On Display for First Time in 200 Years at SF’s Legion of Honor

Hidden away for centuries, masterwork exhibited in public for the first time since the Paris Salon of 1791
By - posted 3/24/2022 No Comment

A rare painting by groundbreaking French artist Marie-Guillemine Benoist has recently been acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Benoist’s groundbreaking work Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell, a rare painting still in existence from her early Neoclassical period, is 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 Paris Salon of 1791 at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor.

View the Painting for Free
The painting will be on view in Gallery 16 at the Legion of Honor beginning March 24, 2022. Thankfully, the painting is located in the permanent galleries, which are free to view every Saturday for Bay Area residents.

The Legion of Honor is located at 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.

‘Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell‘ was the first history painting shown at the Paris salon by a woman artist. – artnet

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”.

Providing a fresh and specifically female 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.

Read more at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Legion of Honor museum: Lincoln Park \ 100 34th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94121 \ 415.750.3600 \ Hours: Tuesdays – Sundays, 9:30 am – 5:15 pm