Guillon Lethière, Born in Guadeloupe

November 13, 2024 - February 17, 2025 Exhibition has ended

Born in Guadeloupe to a freed slave mother of African descent and a royal officer father, he was educated in Rouen and then Paris under the Ancien Régime, and enjoyed a brilliant official career; director of the Académie de France in Rome (1807-1816), elected member of the Institut in 1818, he was professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from 1819. He was also a major collector and advisor to Lucien Bonaparte.His output illustrates the career of an artist confronted with the upheavals of his era and ...
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Exhibition catalogues

Guillon Lethière, Né à la Guadeloupe - Exhibition catalogue

MX030962

€ 59

Exhibition 'Guillon Lethière, born in Guadeloupe' at the Musée du Louvre from 13 November 2024 to 17 February 2025.

Guillaume Guillon-Lethière (1760-1832) was one of the major figures on the French artistic scene in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His career was brilliant, but he is largely forgotten today. Director of the Académie de France in Rome from 1807 to 1816, member of the Institut in 1818, professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1819, he was a history painter and artist admired in his time - but also a sensitive portraitist.
A passionate collector, he advised great art lovers such as Lucien Bonaparte and the Duc d'Albe.

This exhibition, co-organised by the Clark Art Institute (Williamston, Mass.) and the Musée du Louvre, will provide an opportunity to reconsider his work as a whole.
The research carried out for the catalogue will shed new light on his Guadeloupean identity and certain hitherto little-known aspects of his biography, in particular his links with the West Indian diaspora.

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Guillon Lethière, Born in Guadeloupe

November 13, 2024 - February 17, 2025 Exhibition has ended

His output illustrates the career of an artist confronted with the upheavals of his era and the succession of regimes from the Revolution to the July Monarchy.

Most of his paintings and drawings are based on 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 gradually took over. Ancient heroism inspired him to paint two immense canvases, nearly eight meters long and now in the Louvre, Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death, completed in Rome in 1811, and The Death of Virginia (1828).

Lethière's most famous painting, Le Serment des ancêtres (Port-au-Prince, musée du Panthéon national haïtien), a manifesto against slavery and for the freedom of peoples, is featured prominently in the exhibition. Most of the works will be presented in Paris for the first time since the 19th century, and the new research carried out for both the exhibition and the catalog will make it possible to better understand the artist's work.

This exhibition is supported by the Cercle international du Louvre - American Friends of the Louvre and the Ford Foundation.

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Guillaume Guillon Lethière was "one of the great authorities of his time" writes Charles Blanc in his Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles (1865). Born in 1760 in Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe, the illegitimate son of a slave of African origin and a white French royal official, Guillon Lethière had an exceptional career, holding some of the most prestigious positions in the world of the arts. Throughout his life, he maintained close ties with personalities and artists from the Caribbean, and with the Dumas family - the General, also the son of a slave, and the young writer Alexandre Dumas. Like many of his contemporaries, he had to adapt to a rapid succession of regimes and political reversals to obtain his commissions, from the revolutionary period to the dawn of the July Monarchy.

This exhibition takes you on this unique and eventful journey, at the same time revealing the possibilities offered by an era of change and upheaval. It is an opportunity to rediscover his work, largely devoted to classical and literary subjects, and his most famous painting, The Oath of the Ancestors, offered to the newly created republic of Haiti, in which he expresses his solidarity with the freedom of populations and the equality of human beings.