Guillon Lethière, né à la Guadeloupe

Exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 13 November 2024 - 17 February 2025 ;
previously at the Clark Art Institute, Williamston, 15 June - 14 October 2024

Guillaume Guillon Lethière (1760-1832) was one of the leading figures on the French art scene in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although largely forgotten today, he had a brilliant career. The son of a freed slave mother of African origin and a royal officer father, he was director of the Académie de France in Rome from 1807 to 1816, a member of the Institut in 1818, and a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1819. A history painter and draughtsman admired in his time, a sensitive portraitist and a passionate collector, he advised great art lovers such as Lucien Bonaparte and the Duc d'Albe.

Most of his paintings and drawings are on the subject of ancient history. He began his career in the triumph of Davidian neo-classicism, and his perseverance in this direction led to his discredit at the end of the 1820s, when the younger generation of Romantic artists was gradually establishing itself. Ancient heroism inspired him to paint two immense canvases, almost eight metres long and now in the Louvre, Brutus Condemning his Sons to Death, completed in Rome in 1811, and The Death of Virginia (1828).

This catalogue of the exhibition co-organised by the Clark Art Institute and the Musée du Louvre provides an opportunity to reconsider Guillon Lethière's work as a whole. The research carried out for this book sheds new light on his Guadeloupean identity and certain aspects of his biography that were hitherto unknown, in particular his links with the West Indian diaspora.