If Guillaume Lethière had gone by his father’s surname, Guillon, then the three great Gs of French Empire painting—Gros, Gerard and Girodet—could have added a fourth. Lethière is represented in many eminent collections (among them the Hermitage, the Louvre, and half the provincial museums of France), but he is known mainly to scholars of the art of the Napoleonic era. For this reason, it is a welcome surprise that the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is mounting a full-scale retrospective of the man from June 15 to October 14—with more than one hundred paintings, drawings, and bronzes, including works by contemporaries—that will travel next to the Louvre.
There was, however, a potent reason why Lethière could not take his father’s surname, at least at first: he was the illegitimate third child of Pierre Guillon, a white plantation owner in the French Caribbean possession of Guadeloupe, where he was born. His mother, Marie-Francoise Pepeyë, was possibly enslaved at the time of his birth, before she became a “free woman of color,” a mulâtresse afranchie. The name Lethière is derived from Le Tiers, meaning “the third (son).” The artist officially became Guillaume Guillon Lethière only in 1799 when, following the abolition of the Code Noir (which regulated the lives of minorities under the ancien régime), his father was at last able to recognize him legally.
Given Lethière’s mixed parentage and his Caribbean origins, the present exhibition can certainly be seen within the context of the Great Reckoning, as it is often called, which has lately inspired museums throughout the world to reexamine their relationship to minorities, especially those of African descent. As such the show takes its place beside a fine exhibition mounted last year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, devoted to an artist whom Diego Velásquez had owned and trained, before emancipating him.
Lethière appears to have been proud of his roots, or, at the very least, in no way ashamed of them. Oath of the Ancestors (Fig. 2), one of the more arresting works at the Clark, celebrates, two decades after the fact, the new nationhood of Haiti. In it a pair of generals of African descent, Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, embrace one another as they stand before an altar. Their glances are lifted heavenward toward a very pale God the Father, while the shackles of servitude lie at their feet, and behind them a crowd has gathered to proclaim their liberty.
What is curious about Lethière, however, is that, despite his origins and his ethnic appearance, neither fact seems to have hindered his career at any point. Before becoming a painter—and a history painter, no less—he graduated from the École des Beaux Arts (to use its present name) and placed second in the prestigious Prix de Rome, which allowed him to spend four years at the famous French Academy of Rome, whose director he would later become at the behest of Napoleon himself. And when Lethière emerged from his rigorous training he was ready and most willing to celebrate the powers that be, especially the Bonapartes, with their multitudinous brood eager for portraits and their numerous battles that cried out for commemoration. Lethière was especially close to the emperor’s older brother Joseph, for a time king of Naples and later king of Spain. Ingres’s magnificent portrait of Lethière in middle age, drawn in Rome in 1815 (Fig. 6), positively pulsates with physical, material, and spiritual success.
Like all the eminent painters of the French Revolution and the Empire, Lethière was born into the ancien régime and he was very much a product of that earlier age. He is essentially to be seen as an Old Master, and his was the last generation of humanity to which that label could be plausibly applied. Although some of the moodiness of the so-called romantic rebellion seeps in around the edges of his later works, Lethière’s oeuvre is marked by a remarkable continuity over half a century of diligent and consistent labor. Only toward the very end of his career do we find a hesitant relaxation of his relentless self-mastery, a slight loosening of the brushstrokes in Lafayette Introducing Louis-Philippe to the People of Paris (1830–1831).
Far more typical is Lethière’s Torso or Half-Length Figure (Fig. 3), which fully embodies all the aspirations of late eighteenth-century academic painting in regard to the human figure. Even more ambitious is the crowded Brutus Condemning his Sons to Death (Fig. 1), now part of the Clark’s collection. Included in the present exhibition is another version of the same work, executed nearly a quarter of a century later and belonging to the Louvre. The Clark version is the more successful, with its richer palette and evocative suppression of detail in depicting the architectural context. It is also decidedly more gruesome. On the left side of the canvas the executioner raises up the severed head of Brutus’s son, a detail that has been decorously suppressed in the Louvre version, in which, instead, we see the corpse being borne away.
Lethière’s ambitions, in a word, were those of a successful French master in the decade or so on either side of 1800. Like so many of his generation of fellow artists, he passed through the fires of revolution and emerged at the other side relatively unchanged by the ordeal. His themes both before and after that cataclysm are almost reassuringly conventional: like so many artists before him, he illustrated the Italian poet Torquato Tasso in Erminia and the Shephards (Fig. 4), and a similarly literary orientation is revealed in Homer Singing His Iliad at the Gates of Athens (Fig. 5).
Indeed, the Battle of Waterloo would come and go, taking the Bonapartes with it, and still Lethière is at his easel, unflappably turning out his classical mythologies as though nothing worthy of note had happened. With a few adjustments, one of his more successful works, Venus and Adonis from the Musée des Beaux Arts in Rouen (Fig. 9), could have been painted by Lagrenée fifty years earlier, or by Domenichino over a century before that.
The height of Lethière’s success, in terms of his career, if not his art, was surely his proximity to the Bonapartes. He depicted Napoleon himself on several occasions, especially in his Preliminaries of Peace Signed at Leoben, April 17, 1797 (1805). He also portrayed two of Napoleon’s brothers, Joseph and Lucien, as well as the Empress Josephine, seated somewhat awkwardly on her throne (Fig. 8). Far more successful as paintings and portraits are two works from about 1799, Portrait of Adèle Papin Playing the Harp (Fig. 7) and Woman Leaning on aPortfolio (Fig. 10). Especially the latter work reveals the artist at his best, discharging his formidable technique in the service of a compelling formal and chromatic idea.
Lethière is not always that good. Although he is a product of his age, he does not transcend it, as David, Ingres, and Boilly so often did. But if he is bound by the conventions of his training, he is also empowered by them, in terms of color, conception, and sheer execution, qualities that, in the older sense, were largely passing out of the competence of Western painting in its transition to romanticism and beyond. This is the saving grace of the Old Masters in general and of Lethière in specific, that they can provide aesthetic satisfaction even in their most conventional and routine moments.
