Amy Crawford (Smithsonian Magazine) writes about a new exhibition in Massachusetts that “illuminates the success of Guillaume Lethière.” [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this article to our attention. Also see previous post Guillaume Lethière.]

Born to a formerly enslaved mother in Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832) moved to Paris as a teen with his plantation-owner father and launched his artistic career during the tumultuous years before the French Revolution. Lethière’s talent as a painter of portraits of the rich and famous, landscapes, and scenes from history won him plum academic posts and a place at the center of Creole society. But in the two centuries after his death, the neo-Classicist has faded into relative obscurity.

That’s set to change in June with the world’s first-ever Lethière retrospective, at Massachusetts’ Clark Art Institute. The show aims not just to rehabilitate Lethière as an artist but also to tell the story of a remarkable life. He lived in an age of “drastic shifts in politics and painterly styles,” says Esther Bell, the Clark’s chief curator. “We want people to learn about him as a gifted, ambitious artist, but also what it meant to be of mixed race, from the Caribbean, living in France at this time.”   

For original article and more paintings, see https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-this-caribbean-born-artist-became-toast-of-18th-century-france-180984290

[Shown above: “Portrait of Adèle Papin Playing the Harp,” oil on canvas, c. 1799. The 17-year-old sitter, the famously beautiful daughter of a prominent family, was later rumored to be Napoleon’s mistress. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Photo: Studio Sebert for Tajan.]