Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of him, but note that Lethière has long been admired in Guadeloupe, where he was born in 1760. According to Esther Bell, curator of a great new exhibition on Lethière, there’s an auto repair shop named “Guillaume Lethière” in the coastal town of Sainte-Anne. At the heart of a busy roundabout in the nearby French quarter is a former plantation. “The Growth of Latierre” is a huge iron sculpture in the shape of a painter’s palette flanked by two giant paintbrushes. Carved from iron, it displays Latierre’s face as painted in 1815 by his student, the great neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
This summer, you might see one of Lethières’ most beautiful portraits (scholars think it probably depicts Lethières’ stepdaughter, Eugénie Servier, an accomplished artist in her own right) painted large on a highway billboard advertising “Guillaume Lethières” at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, through October 14. The exhibition is scheduled to travel to the Louvre in November.
Researched and developed over many years by Bell, Clark Art Institute’s deputy director and chief curator, and museum director Olivier Messer, and accompanied by a 432-page catalogue, the exhibition tells the story of Lettiere’s remarkable life.
To understand his importance, it is not enough to look merely at his paintings and drawings – although these works were very fine and won him much acclaim during his lifetime – but one must also consider his own complex involvement in the world-historical events in which he lived.
Lethière was born a slave (at least that is what we can infer from his parents’ origins and the absence of baptismal records), but was brought to France in 1774, at the age of 14, by his father, who was procurator for the French king in Guadeloupe. He began his training as an artist in Rouen, and through his father’s influence he was already close to power by his late teens.
But of course, staying in power when there was constant change was not easy: like others of his generation, Lethière had to navigate the final years of the Ancien Régime, the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the conquest of Europe, the collapse of the Empire, a brief Bonapartist revival, the Restoration, and finally, shortly before his death in 1832, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy.
What makes him unique and interesting is that he managed all of this while also dealing with the transformative effects of his illegitimate, mixed-race origins in Guadeloupe.
Although he was neither servile nor a subservient man, Lethière knew how to please others: “His honesty, his good manners and his unwavering openness and sincerity won him the respect and friendship of all,” wrote François-Guillaume Ménageot, president of the French Academy.
Lethière and her mother, Marie-Françoise Pépayer, were both freed by Pierre Guyon, but it took years for the law to be changed so that Guyon could recognize Lethière as his son. Lethière and her sister were named Guyon’s heirs around the time of Napoleon’s rise to power in 1799.
And yet, many years later, Lethière had to defend himself against an embarrassing rebuttal from a distant cousin who claimed he was the rightful heir in 1819, at the height of the artist’s fame. The court ultimately ruled in Lethière’s favor, but not before the press made humiliating allusions to the celebrated painter’s “simple and modest pedigree.”
Moral and political complexities weighed on nearly every aspect of Lethière’s life: there is no doubt that he was an abolitionist, for example, but he benefited financially from his father’s plantations, which depended on slave labor.
Although Lethière never returned to the Caribbean, he cared deeply about the fate of its people: he supported the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, just before the abolition of the French monarchy, and welcomed the decision of the French government to abolish slavery throughout its territory in 1794.
Lethière would no doubt have been disappointed eight years later when Napoleon reinstated slavery in the colonies and brutally crushed attempts at resistance in Guadeloupe, but by this time he had become a member of the Bonaparte family: he painted portraits of Napoleon’s Caribbean-born wife, the Empress Josephine, among others, and left his fortune to Napoleon’s brother, Lucien Bonaparte.
In 1807, due to his friendship with Lucien Bonaparte, Lethière was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome, a highly prestigious position, where he revitalized the Academy and He oversaw the training of dozens of France’s leading artists, including Ingres, who produced a magnificent series of paintings of Lethière’s family (which were exhibited), and his female student Antoinette Cécile Hortense Lescot, who exhibited over 100 paintings in the Paris Salons.
Ancient Rome was of great interest not only to the French revolutionaries, who modelled their republic on it, but also to Napoleon, who saw his own interests in the Roman Empire. Art played a major role in establishing these lineages.
Lethière was studying at the Academy in Rome at the time of the outbreak of the French Revolution, when he was inspired by his surroundings to create a monumental work called “Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death.” A meticulous frieze-like composition, it depicts Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, calmly watching the beheading of his sons, who had plotted to restore the monarchy.
Lettiere returned to this theme and another Roman episode, “The Death of Virginia,” many times, and it is easy to imagine that this painting had a special meaning for him, given that its theme of a father killing his daughter at her request is linked to the ignominy of slavery.
Versions of both paintings were exhibited in Rome and London with great success, but tastes were changing in Paris and by the first decade of the 19th century, Romanticism was on the rise, and Lethière’s neoclassical style began to fall out of favor.
Winning his inheritance case in 1819 seems to have prompted Lethière to turn his attention back to the Caribbean, where in 1822 he painted one of his most daring canvases: a massive (approximately 11 feet by 7 feet) painting in the National Panthéon in Port-au-Prince. It depicts two generals, one mulatto and one black, pledging to fight together for the freedom and independence of the people of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti).
After a dangerous and secret voyage, Lethière’s son personally delivered the painting to Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer in Port-au-Prince, and two years later, King Charles X of France reluctantly recognized Haiti, but only in exchange for the payment of indemnities that would stifle the young nation for decades.
Unfortunately, due to Haiti’s recent civil war, the painting was unable to make it to the U.S. Lethière himself intended the painting for a Haitian audience, and according to Bell, who has tastefully installed a reproduction of the painting in the exhibition, the painting “encapsulates Lethière’s loyalty to his homeland.”
Clarke immerses us in decades of political turmoil that continues to reverberate today. There is also much to say about other French artists and writers with connections to the Caribbean. So it is more than just a monograph. Despite the stately arrangement of Clarke’s galleries and the superficial formality of Lethière’s neoclassical style, the exhibition is like a spinning firecracker that ignites light, knowledge and cultural energy, deepening our understanding of a great heritage.
Guillaume Lettiere The exhibition will run at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts until October 14th, then from November 13th to February 17th at the Louvre in Paris. Clark Art.