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Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of him. But be aware that in Guadeloupe, where he was born in 1760, Lethière has long been celebrated. According to Esther Bell, the curator of an extraordinary new exhibition about Lethière, there is an auto-body repair shop in the coastal town of Sainte-Anne bearing the name “Guillaume Lethière.” Nearby, in the center of a busy rotary in the French neighborhood — previously the site of the plantation where Lethière grew up — is a huge steel sculpture in the shape of an artist’s palette alongside two enormous paintbrushes. Shapes cut out of the steel reveal the face of Lethière as he looked in an 1815 drawing by his pupil, the great neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
This summer, you might see Lethière’s loveliest portrait (scholars think it probably depicts his stepdaughter, Eugénie Servières, herself an accomplished artist) blown up on highway billboards advertising “Guillaume Lethière” at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., through Oct. 14. The exhibition will travel to the Louvre in November.
Researched and developed over many years by Bell, the Clark’s deputy director and chief curator, with Olivier Meslay, the museum’s director, and accompanied by a 432-page catalogue, the exhibition tells the story of Lethière’s improbable life.
To understand his significance, it’s not enough just to look at his paintings and drawings — although these are very good and earned him accolades aplenty during his lifetime. You need to consider his own complicated proximity to the world-historical events through which he lived.
Born into slavery (or so it’s assumed, given his parentage and the telling absence of baptismal records), Lethière was brought to France by his father, the French king’s public prosecutor in Guadeloupe, in 1774, when he was 14. He began training as an artist in Rouen. Thanks to his father’s influence, he was already close to serious power by his late teens.
But of course, staying close to power is not easy when the personnel keeps changing. Like others of his generation, Lethière had to steer a course through the last days of the Ancien Régime, the French Revolution, the Terror, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, European conquest, imperial collapse, a brief Bonapartist revival, a restored monarchy, and finally, just before Lethière’s death in 1832, a constitutional monarchy.
What makes him uniquely interesting is that he managed all this while also navigating the shifting implications of his illegitimate, mixed-race origins in Guadeloupe.
Lethière was neither smarmy nor sycophantic, but he knew how to ingratiate himself to others. He “won the esteem and friendship of everyone by his honesty, his politeness, and a frank and loyal character that never wavered,” wrote Francois-Guillaume Ménageot, the director of the French Academy.
Lethière and his mother, Marie-Françoise Pepeye, were both emancipated by his father, Pierre Guillon. But it was many years before changes to the law allowed Guillon to recognize Lethière as his son. Lethière and his sister were named as Guillon’s heirs around the time Napoleon seized power in 1799.
Even so, years later, Lethière had to defend himself against an embarrassing challenge by a distant cousin, who claimed he was the rightful heir. This was in 1819, when the artist was at the height of his renown. The courts eventually found in Lethière’s favor — but not before humiliating references in the press to the esteemed painter’s “naive and modest genealogy.”
Moral and political complexities choked almost every aspect of Lethière’s life. There’s no doubt, for instance, that he was an abolitionist. And yet he benefited financially from his father’s plantation, which depended on enslaved labor.
Although Lethière never returned to the Caribbean, he cared deeply about the fate of its people. He supported the revolution in Haiti, which began in 1791, just before the French monarchy was abolished, and welcomed the French government’s decision, in 1794, to end slavery in all its territories.
When, eight years later, Napoleon reinstated slavery in the colonies, brutally suppressing an attempt at resistance in Guadeloupe, Lethière was surely disappointed. But by now he was in with the Bonapartes. He painted portraits of, among others, Napoleon’s Caribbean-born wife, the Empress Joséphine, and hitched his fortunes to Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother.
In 1807, Lethière’s friendship with Lucien Bonaparte led directly to his appointment as director of the French Academy in Rome — an immensely prestigious post. There he reinvigorated the academy and oversaw the training of dozens of France’s best artists — among them Ingres, who made a series of stunning drawings of Lethière’s family (included in the show), and a female pupil, Antoinette Cécile Hortense Lescot, who went on to exhibit more than 100 paintings in the Paris Salon.
Ancient Rome was of intense interest not only to France’s revolutionaries, who looked to republican Rome as a model, but also to Napoleon, who of course saw more upside for himself in Rome’s imperial period. Art played a huge role in establishing these lines of pedigree.
The French Revolution had broken out while Lethière was a student at the same academy in Rome. At the time, inspired by his environs, he worked on a major canvas, “Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death.” In a carefully structured, frieze-like composition, he depicted the founder of the Roman republic, Lucius Junius Brutus, looking on stoically as his sons, who had plotted to restore a monarchy, are decapitated.
Lethière returned repeatedly to this subject and to another episode from ancient Rome, “The Death of Virginia.” We can perhaps imagine the painting’s special significance for him when we understand that its subject — a father killing his daughter, at her own request — hinges on the dishonor of being enslaved.
Versions of both paintings enjoyed great success when they were exhibited in Rome and London. But in Paris, tastes were changing, and by the 19th century’s second decade, romanticism was on the rise. Lethière’s neoclassical style began to fall out of favor.
Winning the 1819 inheritance case seems to have inspired Lethière to turn his attention back to the Caribbean, and in 1822 he painted one of his most audacious canvases — an enormous (approximately 11 by 7 feet) painting owned by the Musée du Panthéon National Haitien in Port-au-Prince. It shows two generals, one mixed-race and the other Black, swearing an oath to fight together for the freedom and independence of the people of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti).
After a risky and clandestine sea voyage, Lethière’s son personally delivered the painting to Haiti’s President Jean-Pierre Boyer in Port-au-Prince. Two years later, France’s Charles X grudgingly recognized Haiti — but only in return for an indemnity payment that would cripple the young nation for decades.
Unfortunately, the recent civil strife in Haiti has prevented the painting from traveling to the United States. Lethière himself intended the painting for a Haitian audience and, according to Bell, who has tastefully installed a reproduction of it in the exhibition, it “encapsulates Lethière’s fidelity to his place of origin.”
The Clark show immerses us in several decades of political tumult that continue to reverberate today. It has much to say about other French artists and writers with ties to the Caribbean. So it is much more than just a monographic exhibition. For all the stately arrangement of the Clark’s galleries and the superficial stiffness of Lethière’s neoclassical style, the exhibit is like a pinwheeling firecracker, blazing out light, knowledge and cultural energy, and deepening our understanding of a remarkable inheritance.
Guillaume Lethière Through Oct. 14 at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., and then at the Louvre in Paris from Nov. 13 through Feb. 17. clarkart.edu.
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