Madame Philippe Panon Desbassayns de Richemont and Her Son, Eugène is one of a few Benoist paintings that writers have finally attributed to her, after centuries of wrong guesses about its authorship.

The French critic Benjamin Duprat wrote emphatically that the painting was "actually painted by Guérin, another student of David!" Duprat's inaccurate exclamation came thirty years after a sale of the painting also attributed it to David.

A couple of centuries after Benoist's husband committed a massive art history party foul, deciding that his government job with the monarchy was more important than his wife's painting, which ended her career, French intellectuals started writing lots of books, in clouds of cigarette smoke, about the end of the "author-function," which basically means the role of an author in a work of art or writing. Part of the idea was that authorship was a masculine role: the man talks, the woman listens, the man shoots copious film like seed, the woman cuts and edits the film into something watchable, the man writes, the woman reads and interprets. For some reason, maybe because it requires a certain amount of egotism, the authorship role is becoming less important, and reading, absorbing, receiving and interpreting are becoming more important. The centuries of critical bickering and controversy over the authorship of Madame Philippe Panon Desbassayns de Richemont and Her Son, Eugène ended only when the researcher Margaret Oppenheimer recently proved that Benoist painted it, in part, due to the fact the child's outfit is a boy's outfit, and we have details about the lives of the sitter's son and daughter. The two sources I found quoting Oppenheimer on the painting are also written by women.

It is likely that Benoist would appreciate our recognition of her work, but there is a slight possibility that she left it unsigned because she did it just for the joy of doing it, and we reward her humility by remembering her. David could never, and would never, have done a painting as insightful and touching as this one.