Guillaume Guillon-Lethière

Guillaume Guillon-Lethière (French: [gijom gijɔ̃ lətjɛʁ]; 10 January 1760 – 22 April 1832) was a French neoclassical painter.

Guillaume Guillon-Lethière
Portrait by Julien-Léopold Boilly (1822)
Born(1760-01-10)10 January 1760
Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe, France
Died22 April 1832(1832-04-22) (aged 72)
Paris, France
NationalityFrench
Known forpainting
MovementNeoclassicism
AwardsPrix de Rome, Second Grand Prize
Patron(s)Jean-Baptiste Descamps, Gabriel-François Doyen

Life

Born free in Guadeloupe in 1760 to a French colonial official named Pierre Guillon[1] and a "mulatto" mother,[2] Lethière has been often written about in the context of French colonial history and the French Revolution.

At 14 years old, his father took him from Guadeloupe to Metropolitan France. By the age of 17, Guillon-Lethièrehe had become the student of Gabriel François Doyen at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture.[1] Lethière won second prize in the Prix de Rome of 1784 for his painting Woman of Canaan at the Feet of Christ. He entered again two years later, and while he did not win, he succeeded in receiving support to travel to Rome where he further developed his neoclassical style. Lethière remained in Rome for several years

In 1791 he returned to Paris to open a painting studio in direct competition with Jacques-Louis David.[3] In 1818 Lethière was finally elected and also awarded the Légion d’honneur.[4]

A year later he became a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.[3] Among his students were Isidore Pils and Polish [5]-Lithuanian painter Kanuty Rusiecki. Lethière was foster father to Mélanie d'Hervilly, later Hahnemann.

References
  1. "Guillaume Guillon-Lethière (1760-1832), peintre oublié". Guadeloupe-fr.com. Archived from the original on 2007-03-16. Retrieved 2017-07-20.
  2. "Guillaume Guillon Lethiere - FRONTLINE - PBS". PBS. Retrieved 15 April 2016.
  3. Simon Lee, "Lethière [Lethiers; Letiers], Guillaume [Guillon]", Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, [14-02-2007], http://www.groveart.com/
  4. "certificate of the legion of honor". culture.gouv.fr. Retrieved 2017-07-20.
  5. Nitka, Maria (2013). "Rosyjscy i polscy malarze w Rzymie lat 20. XIX wieku – wspólne narodziny malarstwa akademickiego (Russian and Polish painters in Rome in the 1820s and at the beginning of the 1830s – the common birth of the XIX century academic art)". Sztuka Europy Wschodniej (Art of Eastern Europe) (in Polish). Polish Institute of World Art Studies. 1: 309, 311.

Further reading
  • B. Foucart, G. Capy and G. Flrent Laballe, Guillaume Guillon Lethière (Paris and Point-à-Pitre, 1991).
  • Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, "Revolutionary Sons, White Fathers and Creole Difference: Guillaume Guillon Lethière's Oath of the Ancestors of 1822" Yale French Studies 101 (2002): pp. 201–226.
  • T. Oriol, Les Hommes célèbres de La Guadeloupe (Basse-Terre, 1935), pp. 39–47.
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