The Reawakening of Lethière
THE EXTRAORDINARY WORK OF CARIBBEAN-BORN FRENCH NEOCLASSICAL PAINTER GUILLAUME LETHIÈRE OPENS AT THE CLARK
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
Guillaume Lethière, Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death, c. 1788, oil on canvas.
“Guillaume Lethière, a mixed-race, Caribbean-born man who became a star of the French Salon but then fell into relative oblivion, has never before been the subject of a monographic exhibition—a fact that perplexes as much as it excites. A transatlantic enterprise, like the painter’s own life, Guillaume Lethière recounts the ambitious career of a fascinating artist and personality. The son of a white plantation owner and a formerly enslaved woman of mixed race, Lethière moved to France with his father at age fourteen. Establishing himself there as a painter and pedagogue, he would come to open his own studio near the heart of Paris, befriend Lucien Bonaparte, and be named the director of the Académie de France in Rome. He would eventually be named a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts and inducted into the Institut de France. In a time of multiple political upheavals, he nurtured fellow Creole artists in his studio, traveled in Caribbean circles, and, in a dramatic gesture of abolitionist sentiment, covertly sent his son across the ocean to deliver his Guillaume Lethière as a gift celebrating Haiti’s independence. Despite such an extraordinary life story and his accomplished body of work, Lethière remains something of an enigma today, though he was one of the most public artistic figures of his time.” — Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark Art Institute; and Laurence des Cars, Director of Musée du Louvre, from the forthcoming Guillaume Lethière, a 432-page authoritative catalogue on the artist to be released in June, in conjunction with the first-ever major museum exhibition on Lethière’s remarkable life.
Guillaume Lethière, Homer Singing His Iliad at the Gates of Athens, c. 1814, oil on canvas, Nottingham City Museums and Galleries, England, photo/Nottingham City
The opening lecture for Guillaume Lethière begins at 11 a.m. on June 15 at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. The historic exhibition is organized in partnership with the Musée du Louvre and features some 100 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and a tapestry that will shed new light on the presence and reception of Caribbean artists in France during Lethière’s lifetime. Held through October 14 at the Clark, the exhibition then travels to the Musée du Louvre, where it will be on view from November 14, 2024 to February 17, 2025.
Meslay worked on this exhibition for six years with Chief Curator Esther Bell, and the most complicated part was that that the works were scattered all over Europe and the U.S., says Meslay. One lingering question is whether Oath of the Ancestors, one of Lethière’s greatest paintings, will be a part of this exhibition.
Guillaume Lethière, Joséphine, Empress of the French, c. 1807, oil on canvas. Musée des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, France, MV 4700. Photo/ RMN-Grand Palais/Art.
Lethière, born in 1760 in the French colony of Guadeloupe, witnessed the new republic of Haiti go through an upheaval and emerge as a new nation, released from the shackles of colonial France. The painting depicts the summit meeting between the leader of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, and General Jean-Jacques Dessalines (later Jacques I Emperor of Haiti), lieutenant of Toussaint Louverture. It was at that confluence when the two revolutionary leaders made a pact to defeat the French colonial forces and achieve independence. The painting, located at the Musée du Pantéon National Haïtien in Port-au-Prince, was to travel to the U.S. for the opening at the Clark. That was stalled at the time of publication because of the extreme instability in Haiti. The curators still plan to highlight the painting and were still developing how that would be done.
Six years ago, the Clark acquired its first work by Lethière. Completed in 1788 when Lethière was at the French Academy in Rome and subsequently displayed at the Salons of 1795 and 1801, Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death depicts the decapitation of one of the sons of Lucius Junius Brutus. Brutus led the 509 BC revolt to overthrow the last king of Rome and established the Roman Republic, swearing a sacred oath before its citizens that Rome would never again be subject to the rule of a king. When his two sons were discovered to be conspiring to restore the monarchy, Brutus demonstrated his commitment to the Republic by ordering and then witnessing the execution of his own children. Painted before the onslaught of the French Revolution, Lethière’s composition is eerily prescient in its moralizing message and its brutal iconography, according to the Clark. The tale inspired Voltaire and other leaders of the French Enlightenment to establish Brutus as a foundational hero of the French Republic. Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death is the first of two paintings on the subject executed by Lethière. The second version is in the collection of the Musée du Louvre.
“We started to think about an exhibition of Lethière just after buying the painting,” says Meslay. “We understood that he was a painter who was very influential by many aspects.” It was also at a time when there was a renewed focus on Caribbean art.
Years earlier, Meslay published a long entry for a painting by Lethière while working for an art dealer. That artwork was, in fact, the very painting that the Clark bought 30 years later. Not much was written about Lethière, except for a PhD thesis written in the 1990s that was never published. “Lethière was an artist that we have overlooked for many, many years,” says Meslay. “He was one of the most successful teachers of his time. Just after the end of the Napoleonic period, between 1816 and his death in 1832, his students were winning the biggest prize in France, the Prix de Rome, almost every other year. There were very few people of African descent in France at this time, probably 15,000 or 20,000, but there were some who were extremely successful and completely immersed in the French society.”
One such example is the writer Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, who was a good friend of Lethière. “Then we discovered that one of the leading doctors during the Napoleonic period was also the same sort of background of Lethière,” says Meslay. “All of them were connected. This is something that we have just been discovering.”
Similar to Meslay, Bell’s interest in Lethière began years before she joined the Clark, when she was a curatorial fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. She organized an exhibition on Ingres in 2011 at the Morgan, which has one of the great collections of Ingres portrait drawings in the country. One was an incredible portrait of Lethière. “When Ingres likes his sitter, there's something kind of magical and vibrational that happens on the paper,” says Bell. She became immediately fascinated with Lethière as an artist and as a teacher. “Who was this person? I never really heard of him before. As I started to read and look around, I realized he was very important in his time. Why is there not a book? Why is there not a resource readily available? Where can I learn more?”
Seven years on, working at the Clark, Bell learned of a group of three works by Lethière coming up for auction. She immediately notified Meslay. Accompanying Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death was a to-scale preparatory drawing, and a to-scale reproductive engraving after the painting. It was an incredible opportunity for the museum to have all three representations of the same subject. They bid on the trio, which was owned by a private collector. This was no Christie’s sleeper sale; there was institutional interest, and people were closely watching it. “We were elated when we got it!” recalls Bell.
When the painting arrived in Williamstown, it was on its original structure and unlined. It was unbelievable that it was in such a pure state, says Bell. They took it to the Williamstown Art Conservation Center to be lightly cleaned. Bell says there were “piles of dirt and dust” from the delicate process—probably dust from Rome in 1788, where it was originally painted, she says.
“From April of 2018, we were sure that we needed to do something big about the artist, in part because there's never been a major exhibition,” says Bell. That was the first Lethière painting that the Clark purchased. Because of the publicity surrounding the acquisition, they were contacted by a dealer in Bordeaux, France, who had a bound album containing over 100 drawings by Lethière, as well as some by his students and close friends. That album will be in the new exhibition, open to a spread, and a screen will display images from every page of the book—including sketches of dogs, cacti, Roman ruins, and more. “It’s a testament to his time in Rome, as both a student and then as the director of the French Academy,” says Bell.
The Clark also has been acquiring works that show the network surrounding Lethière. The museum purchased a painting by artist Adolphe Roehn, The Swearing in of President Boyer at the Palace of Haiti (c. 1818, oil on canvas). Boyer was the second president of the Republic of Haiti, and the painting depicts a celebration of his inauguration after the death of Alexandre Pétion. “It’s this unbelievable, iconographical depiction of the Haitian Revolution and Haitian independence,” says Bell. “It was a way to more fully tell the story of Caribbean diaspora, the connections between mainland France and the colonies, and the free Republic of Haiti. We found it at an auction in France.”
Lethière and Boyer were aligned in their abolitionist sentiments, which was why Lethière sent his own son to deliver Oath of the Ancestors to the new president as a gift to the people of Haiti.
In 2021, the Clark acquired The Wedding Trip by artist Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, a student of Lethière’s. Mentorship of women artists was very important to him, and Haudebourt-Lescot was one of his most successful students. She exhibited over 100 paintings in the Salon, and when Lethière was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome, he took her with him and installed her as a student there. This caused consternation among the male students—angry letters were written back and forth between Rome and Paris. But Lethière staunchily supported her. The Louvre also has loaned a self-potrait of Haudebourt-Lescot for the Clark’s exhibition.
“A big part of this exhibition is about telling stories that haven't come to light yet,” says Bell, “or maybe not as fully as they deserve to be. Haudebourt-Lescot is an example of one of these many figures.”
Another significant painting by Lethière that will be exhibited is Woman Leaning on a Portfolio, on loan from Worcester Art Museum. “We believe this is a painting of his stepdaughter, Eugénie Servières,” says Bell. “He marries his longtime partner, Marie-Joseph-Honorée Vanzenne, in 1799, and that is the year that he paints this portrait. She becomes not only his stepdaughter, but she is one of his students. Servières would go on to exhibit in the Salon and would sell her paintings to some of the most important collectors and in Europe. She is also an artist completely unknown today. We'll have another example of her work in the exhibition. She's never been consistently identified, so to be able to give her a name and a voice is, again, part of the bigger themes here are like telling stories that have been lost in time.”
With any exhibition, the goal is to bring to light information that may have once been well-known, but has since been lost in history. This is an extreme case, where there are no books, no articles, no dissertations written about many of these artists associated with Lethière—or of him. “All of the archival work is happening in real time,” says Bell. “I have never worked on a project in which we discovered so much new material.” Through this research, they also are discovering and learning more about the strength of Caribbean community in Paris at that time.
The majority of letters associated with Lethière are in the National Archives of France. One of the most beautiful of those letters is not by him, says Bell. His father was in a shipwreck off the coast of the United States, and he made his way to Philadelphia, where there was a big community of Caribbean expatriates. In a letter to his son, he writes, “I acknowledge you as my son.” Up until that moment, Lethière couldn't take the last name of his father, Pierre Guillon. He was born outside of marriage and did not have the legal right to have his father's name. When the laws changed, Lethière’s father writes this declaration of the certainty of his paternity. There are two copies of this letter, and in the version that they found, Lethière’s father mentions the mother, Marie-Francoise Pepaye, about whom, until then, little information was known.
Meslay believes that race was not so much the reason for Lethière fading from the public eye. One reason was that his works weren’t very visible, so it was difficult to see them as a whole to get a better understanding of the artist. The most astounding painting was The Oath of the Ancestors. “It would have been at the core of many studies, but this painting was hidden in plain sight in Haiti for two centuries when it was rediscovered in 1993 by the two people: Geneviève Capy and Gérard-Florent Laballe, and I knew both of them at this time,” says Meslay. The painting was long believed to have been lost in a fire that had ravaged the Cathedral of Haiti where it hung. The badly damaged piece was discovered, and thanks to the initiative of the Association des Amis de Lethière, a cultural organization set up in Guadeloupe by Capy and Laballe, it was sent to France and restored. It was only since the painting resurfaced that attention was given to Lethière. The new book on Lethière connected to the Clark exhibition is dedicated to Capy and Laballe.
Meslay has a definite impression that Lethière was deeply social and deeply faithful to people. “A surprise to me was to discover that he was a good friend of Marquis de Lafayette from very early on,” says Meslay. “We do not have the exact trace of their first meetings, but later in Lafayette’s life, he is describing Lethière as one of his oldest friends. I never heard of that before.”
Because he was light-skinned and because he was friends with many people in France who were white, Lethière could have ignored his mixed-race background and not talked about it, says Meslay. But he didn’t. “Lethière was extremely faithful to his African roots. A lot of his friends were people of mixed race, and that he made this painting to celebrate Haiti’s independence at a time when France was at war with Haiti is amazing. He was an academician, and he knew the king and was extremely established. At the same time, he was doing this painting that celebrated two men whom a lot of people in France hated because they made Haiti independent. That's unbelievable.”
Oath of the Ancestors, c. 1822, oil on canvas. Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien, Port-au-Prince. Photo/ RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.
Besides the Oath of the Ancestors and Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death, Meslay is drawn to another painting that will be exhibited, on loan from Nottingham City Museums and Galleries in England titled Homer Singing His Iliad at the Gates of Athens (c. 1814, oil on canvas). “It is a painting showing Homer singing his songs as a sort of beggar in the street of Athens,” says Meslay. “It's a very gentle painting, very beautiful. There is a benevolence, which is a reflection of Lethière’s own personality.”
Events in conjunction with Guillaume Lethière are scheduled through the summer at the Clark, such as the Opera Lafayette performing music from the 18th century French Caribbean on Wednesday, June 26, at 6 p.m.; live music by Jacques Schwarz-Bart and Band from Guadaloupe and Haiti on Wednesday, July 3, at 6 p.m.; and Sonny Troupe and Band on Wednesday, July 10, at 6 p.m.
The exhibition Invisible Empires by Kathia St. Hilaire will open in the Clark’s Lunder Center at Stone Hill on May 11. St. Hilaire blends historical facts with the larger-than-life legends of Haiti’s famed personalities and describes her work as “magical realist.” In representing creolized cultures, the artist uses a collage of nontraditional materials, from banknotes and banana stickers to product packaging and tire treads. And like the open weaving at the edges of her work, the artist suggests, the Haitian revolution is itself an unfinished project.