Portrait of Charles-Albert Demoustier

Painted in 1785 and depicting Charles-Albert Demoustier, a French poet and playwright known above all for his Lettres à Émilie sur la mythologie, this early Benoist portrait was produced when she was approximately seventeen years old and still training under Vigée Le Brun. Demoustier was an important figure in late Ancien Régime literary culture, and his later mythological writings were popular throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. A portrait of a literary figure executed so early in Benoist's career suggests that her social and professional world brought her into contact with writers and artists from the beginning of her training. The work has interest both as a document of an early nineteenth-century literary personality and as evidence of Benoist's precocious portrait skills before her Salon debut.

The early portrait shows the influence of Vigée Le Brun's studio practice: warm flesh tones, careful attention to the face, and a relatively simple composition that concentrates entirely on character. At seventeen, Benoist already demonstrates the observational precision that would characterize her mature portraits.