It’s a wonder how a painter of Guillaume Lethière’s stature could be largely forgotten. Sociable and well-connected, he was the mentor of the Neoclassical master Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the family friend of the literary giant Alexandre Dumas, and the artistic advisor of Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte. He was an excellent and prolific painter of ancient and contemporary history, an influential teacher at the center of Parisian artistic life, and the director of the prestigious French Academy in Rome.
Take a look at the convivial party commemorated by Louis Leopold Boilly’s delicate brush. We see Lethière standing front and center in the spotlight, clad in a red robe with his characteristic frizzy hair, turning in discussion about a painting on an easel. A substantial number of portrait paintings, drawings, prints and busts of Lethière, made by his students, friends and admirers, attest to his great popularity in French artistic circles around the year 1800.
After returning to France in 1792, Lethière set up a studio in Paris and officially started his professional career as painter and teacher. A portrait of his stepdaughter with her art portfolio, exhibited at the Salon in 1799, discloses Lethière’s most intimate and caring moment captured in paint. On the other hand, the exuberant portrait of Empress Joséphine shows the artist diligently painting the most minute details of her regalia, in order to fulfill his duty to his powerful patrons.
Of all Lethière’s artworks, the “Oath of the Ancestors” stands out as the most personal and revolutionary painting. It commemorates Haiti’s independence from France in 1804—a key political event close to his childhood home in the Caribbean Islands. In the painting, the two revolutionary leaders, Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, stand on a platform under divine protection. They trample over the broken chains of slavery, swearing an oath to uphold the constitution and freedom of the Haitian people.
Lethière, with republican sympathies and devoted to the abolition of slavery, secretly and audaciously gifted this painting to the fledgling Haitian government before France had officially recognized its independence. His signature boldly declared his origins: “G. Guillon Lethière, born in Guadeloupe in 1760.”
French Neoclassicm
In the French academic tradition, monumental history painting was ranked as the highest genre of art. It tested artists ability to convey complex arrangement using multiple human figures and the visual narration of classical or biblical stories for the moral edification of posterity. Lethière’s Brutus’s “Condemning His Sons to Death” is a prime example.
The painting, conceived in 1788 during his student years in Rome, represents an ancient historical event when the legendary founder of the Roman Republic executed his two sons for their attempt to restore the abolished monarchy. Arranged horizontally in the idiom of classical relief sculpture, the scene depicts an apex of the dramatic storyline between the two deaths. On the left, an executioner holds up the gruesome head of the first son, repulsing an abhorred bystander. In the middle, the second son swoons at the sight, while others beg for mercy, unable to tolerate the continuance of the family tragedy. Brutus, feigning stoicism, clasps his fist tightly but eventually carries out his sentence in defense of the republic.
Reflecting the boiling societal concerns at the dawn of the French Revolution, Lethière’s “Brutus” preceded Jacques-Louis David’s painting “Oath of the Horatii” of the same theme a year later. In contrast with David’s portrayal of Brutus in the aftermath of his “patriotic” event, Lethière represented the high drama of a key confrontational moment amid the architectural grandeur of ancient Rome and the crowded assembly of the Roman citizenry. The artist used the expansive urban setting to accommodate an enormous number of small figures. This reveals his early effort to combine history with the tradition of landscape painting—an effort that resulted in another masterpiece in his mature years.
Rome’s French Art Academy
In 1807, with the support of the Bonaparte family, Lethière was named the director of the French Academy in Rome. In addition to administrative and teaching duties, he painted “Homer Singing His Iliad at the Gates of Athens.”
The artist visually harmonizes figural narrative and poetic landscape, clustering a group of intent listeners around Homer while leaving the canvas open beyond the city to a distant vista. This lyrical rendering of landscape was pioneered by the French master Nicolas Poussin, who visualized the beauty of ancient pastoral poetry through the bucolic sceneries of the Italian countryside. It is from the sublime mountain in a hazy atmosphere or the idle pacing of the shepherd and his flock—like that seen in Poussin’s “Landscape with a Calm”—that Lethière must have drawn his inspiration.
Lethière’s Homer sits on one side of the road, his guide dozing off from their long peripatetic journey. But his epic commands the full attention of the circle of listeners, with one pressing his head forward for a tiny peek at the blind poet. On the opposite side, a couple write on a tablet, hastily recording the oral story with a reed pen. Enticed by the curious gathering, a passerby approaches from the city, while further away tiny figures carry on their daily business and leisurely affairs, oblivious of the momentous literary event that viewers witness.
The Guillaume Lethière exhibition is worth seeing for the history it tells and the beautiful art that it gathers. Catch the exhibition in Williamstown, Massachusetts before it closes; don’t wait until Paris!
