[SIZE=-1]It has been suggested that the Portrait d'une négresse was not commissioned but was painted on the artist's own initiative, and was modeled after a black slave brought back to France by Benoist's brother-in-law, a civil servant and ship's purser who had returned from the French island of Guadeloupe in 1800.10 Africans and colonial blacks were frequently brought to Europe to work in upper class and middle class households and often appear in paintings "as part of a complex ritual of display of . . . the ostentatious wealth the bourgeoisie (and upper classes) accumulated through African slave labor on Caribbean plantations."11 During the time in which Benoist's portrait was painted, planters were allowed to bring slaves onto the French mainland where, legally, slavery had been forbidden since the Middle Ages. French law dictated that once transported onto continental French soil, a slave's status had to be legally changed to that of servant or attendant and registered with the French authorities.12 In all likelihood, therefore, Benoist's sitter was a slave-turned-servant who had no say in the way her body was presented.[/SIZE]
