Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Have you heard of Guillaume Lethière? No? The proud child of Guadeloupe, the plantation slave’s son who rose to become teacher of Ingres, protégé of Napoleon’s kid brother Lucien Bonaparte and director of the French Academy in Rome — none of that rings a bell? Well, you are not alone.Although he qualified as artistic aristocracy (the good kind, that is) in post-revolutionary France, he later vanished so completely from history that the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is the first museum ever to spotlight his work. And even this tribute is necessarily incomplete. A few monumental paintings appear only in early iterations; the final versions hang, prominent yet unnoticed, above a gift shop at the Louvre, waiting for the show to travel there.The conundrum of Lethière powers the exhibition. Given his evident talents and elevated social status, why was he singled out for posthumous obscurity? You might attribute his erasure to racism, though his contemporaries did not clock his racial lineage from his physical features. Besides, Théodore Chassériau, a younger Caribbean-born, mixed-race painter, had his moment more than 20 years ago, in a survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The Clark offers abundant evidence that Lethière was widely admired in his own day and suggests plenty of reasons why. From the confident early anatomical studies that won him a six-year stint at the French Academy in Rome and a handful of astute and sensitive portraits to the great mythological tableaux that occupied him for years, he demonstrated mastery of vivid detail and complex composition.But facility can be a trap. Lethière’s dexterity in navigating treacherous political currents and switching artistic modes may ultimately have worked against him. He slipped easily — too easily — from austere, frieze-like neoclassical scenes to rococo charm, churning romantic landscapes and picturesque troubadour-style neo-medievalism. Some of those approaches jostle together in the same canvas, as in “Venus and Adonis”, where the mortal hunter pulls away from his divine lover while his dogs lunge towards a glowering forest. Posterity likes consistency, or at least stylistic commitment.But perhaps Lethière couldn’t afford consistency. Born in 1760 to the white owner of a sugar plantation and a mixed-race woman, who may also have been his slave, the future artist didn’t inherit his father’s surname, Guillon. Instead, he was merely “le tiers”, the third of his parents’ illegitimate children. He may well have been born a slave and later freed.His life was filled with historical ironies. Lethière emigrated to the colonial motherland and became a paragon of the establishment. On his father’s death in 1800, he inherited the estate back in Guadeloupe and so became a wealthy owner of enslaved people in absentia. Curators Esther Bell and Olivier Meslay probe these bifurcated identities, the way Lethière kept himself aloof from Paris’s political vicissitudes but expressed support for the abolitionist and independence movements in the Caribbean. One subject he returned to throughout his career was “The Death of Virginia”. In that legend from ancient Rome, a powerful official tries to enslave a centurion’s beautiful daughter. Preferring to lose her life rather than her freedom, Virginia instructs her father to stab her. The show traces the picture’s evolution from the sketches Lethière made in his thirties to the vast final canvas of 1828. The swirling crowd converges on Virginia’s father, who turns from the righteous murder he has just committed and lunges at her tormentor, bloody dagger outstretched. If Lethière registered any cognitive dissonance with the fact that he, too, owned human beings, it’s not in evidence here.Another principled but brutal filicide also haunted him. The story of “Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death” had obvious political overtones all through the spasms of revolution and Napoleon’s rise. Lucius Junius Brutus, having founded the Roman republic, ordered the execution of his two sons for conspiring to overthrow it. You or I might read that as a parable of power gone berserk; Lethière’s generation saw it as an allegory of virtue and sacrifice in the face of tyranny.A 1788 drawing set the stage for the many variants he carried out over the next 13 years. The killing takes place in a public square. Brutus, tense, grim and slumped on his raised throne, gazes down along the diagonal at the executioner, who holds the severed head aloft. The victim’s body lies across the chopping block, gushing blood on to the stone stairs. It’s all too much for some members of the mob, who turn and walk off the canvas in shock and disgust.Lethière’s rival and sometime antagonist Jacques-Louis David tackled the same topic in a radically different way in 1789, and it would have been bracing to see the two big, finished paintings side by side. (The final versions remain at home in the Louvre.) Lethière conjured panoramic spectacle and the architectural grandeur that he had studied during his years in Rome. David set his quieter but psychologically tougher interpretation, “The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons”, in the family’s home, after the day’s drama.The two works encapsulate different approaches to being a prominent painter at a time when every public act had a political dimension. David, a fervent Jacobin and disciple of Robespierre, translated ideology directly into paint. Lethière, more temperamentally (and self-protectively) discreet, conjured the clangour and theatricality of violent passions, without making clear which ones he shared.He spent the first years of the revolution in Rome and returned in 1792, in time to see the Terror take hold. By the time he exhibited his oil sketch of “Brutus” at the Paris Salon in 1801, he had covered the leaking wound with a white sheet. Even so, critics found the decapitation too redolent of the recent past. Events had transformed allegory into realism.The strategically convivial Lethière understood the importance of having the right friends, and the exhibition gives us glimpses into his various milieux. He crops up at the centre of Louis-Léopold Boilly’s “Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio”, wrapped in a copper-coloured cloak and listening to a colleague with an expression of congenial intensity. Here he is again, double-chinned and avuncular, in one of the show’s highlights, an 1815 graphite drawing by his student, Ingres.We meet his friends, too: the young Chasseriau, in a striking self-portrait; the swaggering mixed-race general Thomas-Alexandre Dumas being adored by his hunting dogs in a romantic rendering by Louis Gauffier; a portrait by Robineau of the distinguished composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George, who, like Lethière, was the son of a white colonist in Guadeloupe and an enslaved Black teenager.All these supporting actors flesh out the context of a complicated time, and also supply some of the show’s best work. The margins are brilliant — especially Ingres’ sketches of the Lethière family — but the centrepiece is a let-down. In 1822, Lethière secretly painted “Oath of the Ancestors”, a double portrait of Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, heroes of Haitian independence. He then had his son smuggle the canvas to Port-au-Prince as a gift to the young Caribbean state, which the French government pretended did not exist.The painting — which made it to the Clark only in the form of a backlit reproduction — is a stiff and hokey piece of propaganda, with a (white) God swooping out of the clouds to bless the new nation’s ornately uniformed freedom fighters. But there’s no reason to doubt the fervour with which Lethière carried it out. This lavishly laurelled survivor, having improbably reached his sixties, looked back on his life and painted what he truly felt, with all the freedom that comes from experience.To October 14, clarkart.edu
