In Portrait of a Negress (Portrait d’une Négresse), artist Marie-Guillemine Benoist attempts to show her viewers the status of inequality that women had processed in French society by creating an analogy between a slave’s submissive role to his or her master and a female’s role to a male figure. Many of her history paintings have illustrated the same theme. Judging by the multiple contrasting messages that the bare breast and head wrap can convey, it is possible that Benoist is neither for nor against slavery. The head warp, for instance, can represent “one’s status as an enslaved laborer” or a slave’s freedom. Marie-Guillemine Benoist may have used an image of the slave to create more of a social presence and thus fame as an artist since
