Guillon-Lethière, "born in Guadeloupe"

Born in Guadeloupe (it’s in the title of the exhibition) in 1760, the natural son of Pierre Guillon, a plantation owner, and a mixed-race mother who had been born a slave but had been freed. It is not known whether the painter himself was born a slave, but he was no longer one when his father, after no doubt some initial training locally, left with him for Rouen, where he studied at the École de dessin. Having won several prizes, he then went to Paris, where he entered the studio of Gabriel-François Doyen, the starting point of a fruitful career. Although he failed to win the Prix de Rome, it was thanks to his merit that he was nevertheless sent as a boarder to the Académie de France in Rome, which he was able to attend in 1786, travelling in the company of three architects, Charles Percier - who, along with Fontaine, remained one of his closest friends - Louis Pierre Baltard and Claude Louis Bernier.

1. Guillaume Guillon-Lethière (1760-1832)
The Canaanite Woman at
Feet of Jesus Christ, 1784
Oil on canvas - 146.5 x 114 m
Angers, Musée des Beaux-Arts
Photo: Wikimedia (public domain)

See the image in its page

It is a pity that the Louvre exhibition was organised in the former history rooms of the Louvre, which are a little too low-ceilinged. It is true that the usual exhibition rooms are occupied by Figures of the Fool (see article). Above all, it is regrettable that the display does not follow the chronological plan of the catalogue. In fact, we don’t really understand how the exhibition is organised, thematic in a way but without any temporal thread that would enable us to understand the painter’s development. While it is true that he remained faithful to the neoclassical aesthetic, which, at the end of his life, was misunderstood by the public and earned him some criticism, he was not, however, a man of a single style or genre, proving himself equally at home in mythological painting, allegory, portraiture and landscapes.

However, this observation needs to be qualified: Guillon Lethière [1] proved to be somewhat uneven. While some of the paintings are genuine masterpieces - to which we shall return later - others, such as the Portrait of Elisa Baciocchi, Napoleon’s sister, are frankly mediocre, and it is easy to understand why the Emperor refused it. Among the allegories, that of the Preliminaries of the Peace Signed at Leoben, 17 April 1797, which gave rise to the weaving of a tapestry, is a little stiff. A sketch for this composition is on display, but the large painting - included in the catalogue and kept at Versailles - is not. While a painting belonging to the Hermitage, also in the catalogue, is not shown either, for reasons that are well known, it is also a shame that several works (including paintings from the Louvre itself that should be seen in the permanent galleries) are not on display. Guillon Lethière was also a religious painter, and although The Canaanite Woman at the Feet of Jesus Christ from the Musée…