Neo-Classicism, arguably the world’s first really worldwide fashion within the superb and utilized arts, held sway from round 1760 to 1830, leaving its mark from Versailles to Virginia. Revelatory within the palms of its signature geniuses, the painter Jacques-Louis David and the sculptor Antonio Canova, it fell sufferer to the vigour of Romanticism, and, excluding its banner figures, has been largely discounted or derided ever since.
That longstanding lack of curiosity implies that many Neo-Classical artists of observe have been ignored. This yr, the Clark Artwork Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the Musée du Louvre in Paris are mounting a wholesale reassessment of an almost forgotten determine within the motion: the Caribbean-born painter and draughtsman Guillaume Lethière. Born in Guadeloupe in 1760 to a white plantation proprietor of French background and an enslaved mixed-race lady, Lethière turned each rival and colleague to the older David and rose to the very heights of the French artwork institution, serving as a mentor to the likes of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Neo-Classicism’s nice transformer, and the Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau, who helped pave the best way for Impressionism. That includes simply over 100 works, Guillaume Lethière will open on the Clark this month earlier than heading to the Louvre within the autumn.
Not but the topic of a serious monographic present, Lethière has arguably been hiding in plain sight. His two acknowledged masterpieces adorn what could be the Louvre’s most trafficked transitional spot, a gallery that doubles as a present store between the Delacroix and David galleries, simply on the level the place crowds depart behind the room housing the Mona Lisa. Two of his work, Brutus Condemning his Sons to Demise (1811) and The Demise of Virginia (1828), every measuring greater than 25ft lengthy, can not make the journey to the US, however the Clark will recall these works, set in Historical Rome, with a lot of associated research and earlier variations, together with its personal depiction of the Brutus motif from round 1788. That a lot smaller portray, simply over 3ft vast, helped make the younger artist’s title when he was “nonetheless attempting to show himself”, says Esther Bell, Clark’s deputy director. Bell has co-curated the present with the establishment’s director Olivier Meslay, a former Louvre curator himself.
The Clark’s 2018 acquisition of the work, which appears to be like again to the founding of the Roman Republic, impressed the preparation of the present, Bell says. With its frightful depiction of a severed head—pointedly lacking from the bigger, later model within the Louvre—it appeared to anticipate the beheadings of the French Revolution that have been about to engulf Paris just a few years later.
Each Bell and her Paris collaborator, Marie-Pierre Salé, the chief curator on the Louvre’s graphic arts division, argue that Lethière is extra than simply his compelling backstory. Bell cites the hanging theatricality of his mature work, and his “fastidiously composed” use of panorama. And Salé contends that his late drawings reveal a capability to transcend established methods of Neo-Classical draughtsmanship.
The Clark present will debut a lately found drawing, Venus and Vulcan (1822), which surfaced in late 2023. Created with a variety of devices and washes, it has an expressiveness and even luridness that shows something however a reverence for antiquity.
In the course of the top of Napoleon’s reign, Lethière, a favorite of Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte, was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome—a supreme place in French creative life. It was right here that Ingres and Rousseau got here underneath his affect, and the present is wealthy in Bonapartist trappings, together with an 1807 state portrait of Empress Joséphine—one other Caribbean transplant—on mortgage from the Palace of Versailles.
Like Ingres, whose 1815 drawing of his mentor is on mortgage to the present, Lethière was a extremely delicate portraitist. The Clark is selecting as an exhibition emblem an oil-on-canvas work, Girl Leaning on a Portfolio (round 1799), depicting the artist’s step-daughter, Eugénie Servières, who would go on to turn out to be a Salon painter herself.
Lethière was an ideal survivor, first making his title within the twilight of the Ancien Régime, after which occurring to contribute works within the service of each subsequent regime, proper up till the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe I, who got here to energy a few years earlier than Lethière’s loss of life from cholera, in 1832, on the age of 72.
Certainly one of Lethière’s political works is amongst his greatest—Frieze Representing the Neuf Thermidor (July 27, 1794), a drawing celebrating the autumn of Maximilien Robespierre and the winding down of the Reign of Terror. Right here, the artist manages to replace a scene match for an historic sarcophagus with a gale-force dynamism suited to a turbulent current.
A tiny gust of change is coming to the Louvre to accommodate its model of the present, Salé says. Although too massive even to maneuver in-house to a short lived exhibition area, the artist’s two huge masterpieces will turn out to be extra accessible, due to the elimination of a serious distraction: though the onslaught of Mona Lisa viewers will proceed unabated for now, “the store will probably be gone.”
• Guillaume Lethière, Clark Artwork Institute, Williamstown, 15 June-14 October; Musée du Louvre, Paris, 13 November-17 February 2025
