Guillaume Lethière

The Clark Institute's exhibition, Guillaume Lethiére, features over 100 works by Caribbean artist Guillaume Lethiére (1760-1832), an influential figure in French Neoclassical painting.

The son of a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman of mixed race, Lethière moved from Guadeloupe to France with his father at age fourteen. He trained as an artist and successfully navigated the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath to achieve the highest levels of recognition in his time. A favorite artist of Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte, Lethière served as director of the Académie de France in Rome, as a member of the Institut de France, and as a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. A well-respected teacher, he operated a robust studio that rivaled those of his most successful contemporaries. Despite his remarkable accomplishments and considerable body of work, Lethière is not well known today. 

This NEH-supported exhibition, organized in partnership with the Musée du Louvre in Paris, features some one hundred paintings, prints, and drawings, celebrates Lethière’s extraordinary career and sheds new light on the presence and reception of Caribbean artists in France during his lifetime. 

Guillaume Lethiére has been praised by the Times Union for “reigniting” the work of the artist.  

Read more about the exhibition in artnet, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Art Newspaper.  

The exhibition is on view at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts until October 2024, and then travels to the Louvre in Paris from November 2024 to February 2025.