“Guillaume Lethière” Exhibition Catalogue

Guillaume Lethière was a landmark exhibition that opened at the Clark Art Institute in 2024 before traveling to the Louvre Museum later that year. Born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, Guillaume Guillon-Lethière (1760–1832) was a pivotal figure in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art. The son of a formerly enslaved woman of color and a white government official and plantation owner, Lethière moved to France with his father at the age of fourteen. He trained as an artist and successfully navigated the upheavals of the French Revolution and its aftermath to achieve the highest levels of recognition in his lifetime.

A favored artist of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, Lethière held prominent positions at the Académie de France in Rome, the Institut de France, and the École des Beaux-Arts. A highly respected teacher, he ran a prolific studio that rivaled those of his contemporaries Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros.

Despite his remarkable achievements and substantial body of paintings and drawings, Lethière remains relatively little known today. In support of the exhibition, American Friends of the Louvre was proud to provide significant funding for the English-language edition of the catalogue. Lavishly illustrated and authoritative, this groundbreaking publication introduces Lethière to new and broader audiences, restoring him to his rightful place among the most eminent artists of his generation.

An international group of scholars offers the first comprehensive study of Lethière’s extraordinary career within its political, social, and art-historical contexts, addressing themes of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora, while shedding new light on the presence and reception of Caribbean artists in France during this period. The English-language catalogue is published by the Clark Art Institute and distributed internationally by Yale University Press; the French edition was published by the Musée du Louvre.