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Guillaume Guillon-Lethière
Guillaume Guillon-Lethière
	Portrait by Julien-Léopold Boilly (1822)
Born	10 January 1760; Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe
Died	22 April 1832 (aged 72); Paris, France
Nationality	French
Movement	Neoclassicism
Awards	Prix de Rome, Second Grand Prize
Patron(s)	Jean-Baptiste Descamps, Gabriel-François Doyen

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

Life

Youth

He was born in Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe, out of wedlock, to Marie-Françoise Dupepaye, a free person of color, and Pierre Guillon, a colonial Royal Notary.^[1] He and his sister, Andrèze, could not be legally recognized as Guillon's children until 1794, when the Code Noir was abolished.

In 1774, after displaying an early aptitude for art, his father took him to France, where he was placed with the painter Jean-Baptiste Descamps, at the new free drawing school in Rouen. It was there that he adopted the name "Lethière", derived from "letier" (third, as in "third son").^[2] He remained there for three years, then went to Paris and became a student of Gabriel François Doyen at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture.^[1] Those studies lasted until 1786. During that time, he paid frequent visits to the studio of Jacques-Louis David.

Adulthood

He won second prize in the Prix de Rome of 1784 for his painting Woman of Canaan at the Feet of Christ. Two years later, he entered again and, while he did not win, he succeeded in receiving support to travel to Rome, where he further developed his Neoclassical style. In 1787, he too had a son out of wedlock, with a woman named Marie-Agathe Lapôtre. In 1792, he returned to Paris and opened his own painting studio.^[3] He held his first exhibit at the Salon in 1795, with paintings he had created in Rome.

Later Years

In 1799, he married the widow Marie-Joseph-Honorée Vanzenne. A daughter from her first marriage, Eugénie, would also become a painter. The following year, he accompanied the newly appointed Ambassador, Lucien Bonaparte, to Spain, where he helped him build an art collection. Through Bonaparte's recommendation, he was appointed Director of the French Academy in Rome in 1807.

Tenure at the Villa Medici

He served in that position until 1816, when he was replaced, by order of King Louis XVIII.^[4]

Return to France

In 1818 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. That same year, he also became a Knight in the Legion of Honor.^[5] A year later, he became a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.^[3] He ended his career as a member of the Institut de France.

Students

As a head of a studio, a director, and a professor, Lethière dedicated a lot of his time to mentoring the future generation. His numerous well-known students included Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Jean-Louis Gintrac, François Bouchot, Louis Boulanger, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Devéria, Louis Joseph César Ducornet, Isidore Pils, Théodore Rousseau, Kanuty Rusiecki, Octave Tassaert, and his stepdaughter, Eugénie.

Many of his students were successful, frequently winning the highly renowned Grand Prix de Rome for historical and historical landscape painting. Lethière was specially known for giving opportunities to young women, many of whom had family connections to the Caribbean. His pupils include genre painter and portraitist Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot (1784–1845), who painted The Wedding Trip (1825, Clark Art Institute) – a painting that reflects her time in Italy. ^[6]

Selected works

Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death,
1788 (Clark Art Institute)
The Oath of the Ancestors, 1822
The Death of Cato of Utica, 1795 (Hermitage Museum)
Philoctetes on the Island of Lemnos,,
1798 (Louvre)
The Sleep of Venus, 1802

References

^ ^a ^b "Guillaume Guillon-Lethière (1760-1832), peintre oublié". Guadeloupe-fr.com. Archived from the original on 2007-03-16. Retrieved 2017-07-20.
^ Mongan, Agnes; Naef, Dr. Hans (1967). Ingres Centennial Exhibition 1867–1967: Drawings, Watercolors, and Oil Sketches from American Collections. Greenwich, Conn.: Distributed by New York Graphic Society. #30. OCLC 170576
^ ^a ^b Simon Lee, "Lethière [Lethiers; Letiers], Guillaume [Guillon]", Grove Art Online Archived 2008-08-21 at the Wayback Machine, Oxford University Press, [14-02-2007]
^ François Fossier, Les directeurs de la Villa Médicis au 19th century. Correspondance de Guillaume Guillon-Lethière (1807-1816), Paris, L'Harmattan, 2018, 466 p. ISBN 978-2-343-14709-3
^ "Certificate of the Legion of Honor". Base Léonore. Retrieved 2017-07-20.
^ Clark Art Institute. Léthière: A Revolutionary Artist. Clark Art Institute, 2024, https://www.clarkart.edu/About/Press-Room/Press-Room-Archives/2024-Archives/Lethiere-Exhibition.