Oy, so much art out there, who has the time? This was a really good exhibition at the Clark in Massachusetts, co-organized with the Louvre, that I highly recommend on a mixed-race artist from Guadeloupe named Guillaume Lethière (1750-1832) who was one of the most successful and prominent painters in Napoleonic France and since then has been almost completely forgotten in except in the Caribbean. They also had a few works by other creoles along with paintings by white French-mainland artists of creoles who were prominent in French and Haitian history. This Caribbean-mainland French world should have been the main focus instead of just a minor addition to a Lethière solo exhibition because the fact is he’s just not that good a painter. It would have been plenty to include him as just one among many creole artists.
His only truly memorable painting, at least in this show, was Oath of the Ancestors (1822), one of the most important artworks in the history of Haiti, which depicts the country’s first emperor and president, respectively, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Alexandre Pétion.
Mostly he painted scenes like these from French history and ancient Greece and Rome in an academic style which brought him the highest acclaim and important posts as director of academies.
Today they feel dull, excessively detailed, lacking in expression and not especially moving, although competent – essentially, highbrow comic strips that tell stories in order to convey various virtues.
Lethière’s most prestigious commission was a portrait of Empress Josephine which is also not so great. In addition to likewise being tediously literal and thin on artistic expression or insight into human experience like much art of the time, the anatomy and perspective are off so it looks like the throne has no seat and she’s standing with one leg slightly raised. She shares with Lethière a Caribbean origin, having been born in Martinique or possibly nearby in St. Lucia although unlike him her parents were both white Europeans. In fact Lethière was a slave, legally speaking although not in practice, since under the laws of the time all children of enslaved women were slaves. It wasn’t until age 39 that he was recognized as his father’s heir.
At the time, “creole” referred to everyone born in the Caribbean, regardless of whether they were white European, black African, indigenous Caribbean or mixed. This usage is still found today in the Caribbean region.
Some works were by artists who had no connection to Lethière other than having been born in Guadeloupe, such as Benjamin Rolland, who was mixed-race, and Jenny Prinssay, Évremond de Bérard and Jules Joseph Honoré Coussin, who were white. Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot wasn’t creole at all but the exhibition sort of tossed her in with them as an example of the numerous women who were Lethière’s students. All highly worthy and important topics but the presentation was remarkably haphazard coming from institutions like the Louvre and Clark whose whole purpose is based on meticulous thorough documentation.
Théodore Chassériau, a mixed-race creole, was represented here by a self-portrait as well as a study done as a commission from his mentor, the painter Ingres, for what was to be the satan figure in a large painting that Ingres was planning called Christ Chasing the Devil from the Mountain. However it never got any farther than the study and a few rough sketches (which weren’t in the exhibition).
Afterwards I looked into it and learned that a few biographical details on the model have survived and it turns out he posed for a number of paintings including one of the most important French artworks of all time, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (not in the exhibition!) where he was the model for the top figure waving the flag at a nearly indetectable ship on the distant horizon, as well as two others. It’s been said, incidentally, that this is the first history painting where the main central figure is anonymous.
I’ll be honest with you, for a long time I vaguely had this one confused with Liberty Guiding the People by Delacroix (also not in the exhibition!) which is sort of France’s national painting (don’t tell any French people; it’d be like confusing George Washington with Abraham Lincoln). I couldn’t keep them straight because you have to admit from a distance they’re pretty similar and they’re in the same style (yes I know one’s in the ocean and one isn’t). I would see the Raft and think, I could have sworn this had the France lady in it but eventually I sorted it out.
The muddy colors in the Raft are not original, by the way, but the result of darkening and dulling caused by bitumen, a substance that artists used in the paint layers to obtain rich dark tones but which causes the entire painting to darken and disintegrate. The damaging effects were known at the time but Géricault didn’t heed the warnings. Just forty years later, in 1860, people were already alarmed enough by the deterioration that a decay-resistant copy was painted. Delacroix’s Liberty doesn’t contain bitumen and just this year, dingy yellowed varnish on the surface was removed to reveal the original brighter colors.
Here’s a portrait of the same model, Joseph, also by Géricault, that wasn’t in the exhibition. There’s been a fair amount written about him.
Other portraits – by white mainland-France-born artists (the French call it France métropolitaine to include the mainland and nearby islands such as Corsica) – depicted creoles who were important in Haitian history in addition to Pétion and Dessalines, such as Jean-Baptiste Belley, the first Black deputy to the French National Convention (the legislature) and Jean-Pierre Boyer, Haiti’s second president.
Then there were creole military and political figures who made their careers in mainland France as opposed to the Caribbean. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was a revolutionary and Napoleonic war hero and friend of Lethière. Out of all these people, he and the female student of Lethière were the only ones who actually had any connection to him other than being born in the Caribbean. His son was the writer Alexandre Dumas (sometimes called Dumas père, or father, because his own son, known as Dumas fils, was also named Alexandre.) Joseph Bologne, more often referred to as Chevalier de Saint-George – a title bestowed on distinguished equestrians – led a regiment consisting mostly of men of color in the French Revolution and also was an accomplished musician.
Today, Lethière is very much known in Guadeloupe where he’s viewed with civic pride. In 2008 a sculpture of him by an artist named Richard-Viktor Sainsily-Cayol, based on a portrait by Ingres, was erected in a roundabout in the town of Sainte-Anne where Lethière was born.
