Benvenuti was the leading neoclassical history painter and portraitist in Tuscany in the early decades of the nineteenth century. He was born in Arezzo and entered the Accademia di Belle Arte in Florence as a young man. In his twenties, he travelled to Rome where he came under the influence of Antonio Canova and Vincenzo Camuccini (who remained a lifelong friend), and was exposed to the great works of Italian Baroque painting. Benvenuti’s career flourished in Rome under the period of French rule, and he returned to Florence in 1803 as director of the Accademia di Belle Arte. He received commissions from Napoleon, decorated new rooms in the Palazzo Pitti in 1811-12 and frescoed the dome of the Capella Medicea at San Lorenzo. In 1807 he was recruited as court painter to Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi (1777-1820), younger sister of Napoleon and Grand Duchess of Tuscany.

Benvenuti was a prolific portraitist. The present likeness of a dreamy-eyed young woman wearing a wine-colored gown and pearls, and signed by the artist, can be identified as a portrait of Benvenuti’s wife. The painting was almost certainly created as the pendant to a Self-Portrait of identical dimensions to the present painting, which was sold at Sotheby’s, Milan, 13 November, 2003 (see L. Fornasari, Pietro Benvenuti, Florence, 2004, p. 225, fig. 190). That these portraits of artist and wife were conceived together is confirmed by the existence of fine autograph replicas of the two portraits — still paired together — in the collection of Carlo Virgilio, Rome (op. cit., figs. 191 & 192). As Fornasari notes, the portraits can be dated to circa 1807-08. The artist appears to be in his mid- to late thirties in his self-portrait, and his wife’s apparel is consistent with the French style of female dress that was fashionable in the Italian court circle of Eliza Bonaparte during the middle years of the Empire. Benvenuti has modelled his wife’s pose on the first-century Roman statue of ‘Pudicity’, a celebrated image of feminine modesty (Vatican Museums) that provided inspiration for painters throughout Europe from the time of its rediscovery in Rome in the sixteenth century.