How This Caribbean-Born Artist Became the Toast of 18th-Century France

Born to a formerly enslaved mother in Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832) moved to Paris as a teen with his plantation-owner father and launched his artistic career during the tumultuous years before the French Revolution. Lethière’s talent as a painter of portraits of the rich and famous, landscapes, and scenes from history won him plum academic posts and a place at the center of Creole society. But in the two centuries after his death, the neo-Classicist has faded into relative obscurity.

That’s set to change in June with the world’s first-ever Lethière retrospective, at Massachusetts’ Clark Art Institute. The show aims not just to rehabilitate Lethière as an artist but also to tell the story of a remarkable life. He lived in an age of “drastic shifts in politics and painterly styles,” says Esther Bell, the Clark’s chief curator. “We want people to learn about him as a gifted, ambitious artist, but also what it meant to be of mixed race, from the Caribbean, living in France at this time.”