ARTH 590
Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832) and Caribbean Networks in France during the 18th and 19th centuries Fall 2024
Division I

Born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832) was a key figure in French painting during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The son of a white plantation owner and a formerly enslaved woman of mixed race, Lethière moved to France with his father at age fourteen. He trained as an artist and successfully navigated the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath to achieve the highest levels of recognition in his time. A favorite artist of Napoleon’s brother, Lucien Bonaparte, he served as director of the Académie de France in Rome, as a member of the Institut de France, and as a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. Despite his many accomplishments and sizeable corpus of paintings and drawings, Lethière has notably disappeared from the “canon” of art history. Such a lacunae begs many questions about the circles of sociability in which he traveled, the reception of Caribbean artists in France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the lack of widespread knowledge on these topics today. This seminar will be timed with the major monographic exhibition taking place at the Clark Art Institute in the summer/fall of 2024. The course will also provide an opportunity for close examination of objects in the Clark’s permanent collection.