Guillon Lethière, from Guadeloupe to the Louvre

From November 13, 2024 to February 17, 2025, the Louvre Museum presents the exhibition “Guillon Lethière, born in Guadeloupe”

Source: Louvre · Image: “Brutus condamnant ses fils à mort”, 1811, by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière · Louvre, Paris

This exhibition co-organized by the Clark Art Institute of Williamstown and the Louvre Museum will be the first major monograph devoted to an artist who is largely forgotten today, who was nevertheless “one of the great authorities of his time” (Charles White).

Born in Guadeloupe to a freed slave mother of African origin and a white royal officer, he was trained in Rouen then in Paris under the Ancien Régime and had a brilliant official career; director of the French Academy in Rome (1807-1816), elected member of the Institute in 1818, he was a professor at the School of Fine Arts from 1819. He was also a great collector and advisor to Lucien Bonaparte.

His production illustrates the journey of an artist confronted with the political upheavals of his time and the succession of political regimes from the Revolution to the July Monarchy. Most of his painted and drawn work has ancient history as its subject and it begins in the context of the triumph of Davidian neo-classicism; his perseverance in classicism will cause his discredit at the end of the 1820s while the young generation of romantic artists gradually established themselves. Ancient heroism inspired two immense canvases almost eight meters long kept in the Louvre, Brutus condemning his sons to death, completed in Rome in 1811, The Death of Virginia (1828).

Lethière’s most famous painting, unique in his work, The Oath to the Ancestors (Port-au-Prince, Haitian National Pantheon Museum), manifesto against slavery and for the freedom of peoples, will be honored in the course. Most of the works from public or private collections will be presented in Paris for the first time since the 19th century and the new research carried out both for the exhibition and for the catalog will allow a real rediscovery of this artist.