The Benois Line

The Benois story begins not with an emigre but with five generations of French country people who never traveled farther than the next market town. The earliest documented ancestor is Francois Benois, born around 1660 in Sezanne, a vigneron tending the slopes of the Champagne wine region. His son Denis-Nicolas (1683-1706), a farmer and miller, died at twenty-three, leaving a four-year-old orphan.

That orphan, Nicolas-Denis Benois (1702-1748), achieved a measure of upward mobility through literacy - a rare commodity in rural France. He became schoolmaster and parish clerk of Saint-Ouen-sur-Morin, a dairy-farming hamlet in the Brie east of Paris, one of the few literate men in the parish, teaching the village children their letters and recording its baptisms, marriages, and burials.

His son Nicolas (1729-1813) stayed in the village as its baker and confectioner and lived to the remarkable age of eighty-four. With his wife Marie-Catherine Lorin (1738-c. 1794/97) he raised five children in the last decades of the Ancien Regime. Marie-Catherine, the peasant matriarch, lived to watch the Revolution destroy the only social order her ancestors had ever known; she died between 1794 and 1797 - possibly in the very year her son fled to Russia.

Louis Jules Benois (1770-1822) apprenticed as cuisinier-patissier and worked for the Duke of Montmorency, mastering the high art of French confectionery. The Revolution destroyed the aristocratic world that employed him, and in 1794, at twenty-four, he fled France for St. Petersburg.

There he secured appointment as confectioner to Empress Maria Feodorovna and later advanced to maitre d'hotel at the Imperial court. In Russia he was known as Leonty Nikolaevich Benois - the French confectioner Russified into the founder of a Russian family. He married Anna-Catherine Groppe, a German coppersmith's daughter, and the couple had eighteen children, of whom eleven survived to adulthood.

He was the first of the dynasty's three founders carried east by the same revolutionary storm: the confectioner in 1794, the composer Catterino Cavos in 1797, the wounded major Paul Lanceray in 1812. None of the three ever knew the others - yet within two generations their descendants had intermarried.

Nicholas Benois (1813-1898) was godson of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna herself - an extraordinary honor reflecting his father's faithful service. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts from 1827 to 1836, won the major gold medal and its fellowship to Italy (1840-1846), was appointed court architect in 1844, and in 1850 was named Chief Architect of Peterhof.

At Peterhof his neo-Gothic ensemble - above all the vast Imperial Stables and the New Peterhof railway station of 1857, considered his masterpiece - gave the suburb of fountains a romantic medieval counterpoint to its baroque palaces. On September 15, 1848 he married Camilla Albertovna Cavos, granddaughter of the composer Catterino and daughter of the architect Alberto - the marriage that fused the French and Italian lines into a single dynasty.

Nicholas and Camilla had nine children, of whom seven survived - and Alexandre Benois liked to say that children in their family were born with a pencil in their hand. The eldest, Camilla (1849-1920), married the British immigrant Matthew Edwards; their daughter married Alexander Tamanian, the architect of the master plan of Yerevan - the Benois architectural tradition transplanted to the Caucasus.

Ekaterina (1850-1933), herself a painter, married the sculptor Eugene Lanceray in 1874 and became Zinaida's mother. Widowed at thirty-six, she raised six children in her father's house; she remained in the USSR when Zinaida left for Paris in 1924, and her death in Leningrad in 1933 - mother and daughter never having seen each other again - was one of the great griefs of Zinaida's life.

Albert (1852-1936) became a celebrated watercolorist and a founder of the Society of Russian Watercolourists; his daughter Maria married the composer Nikolai Tcherepnin, linking the family to Russia's musical avant-garde. Leon (1856-1928), architect and Academy professor, built the St. Petersburg Court Choir Chapel; Leonardo da Vinci's "Benois Madonna," now in the Hermitage, came through his wife's family; and his daughter Nadia Benois (1896-1975) settled in England and became the mother of Peter Ustinov.

The youngest surviving child became the family's most famous member. Alexandre Benois (1870-1960) - painter, critic, art historian, and theatrical designer - co-founded the Mir iskusstva (World of Art) movement and magazine with Sergei Diaghilev and Leon Bakst in 1898, transforming Russian visual culture. His own painting found its great subject in Versailles, in the celebrated "Last Walks of Louis XIV" series, and his illustrated Azbuka of 1904 is a landmark of Russian book art.

For the Ballets Russes he designed Les Sylphides (1909) and, in 1911, co-wrote the libretto and designed the sets of Petrushka - one of the most influential ballets of the twentieth century. After the Revolution he served as curator of the Hermitage's picture gallery (1918-1926) before settling in Paris in 1926, where he became the indispensable patron of his niece Zinaida's emigration.

His son Nicola Benois (1901-1988) carried the family's stage art to Italy as chief designer of La Scala from 1936 to 1970 - so that for a third of the twentieth century, the look of the world's most famous opera house was, quite literally, a Benois design.