Have you ever heard of Guillaume Lethière? I didn’t think so. Nor had I, though this neo-classical French painter has been hiding in plain sight for the past century. Two of his massive historical paintings have been hanging in the Louvre all this time—but well up out of sight in a room that sells knick-knacks once you’ve finished looking at the Mona Lisa.
Now the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown has teamed up with the Louvre to present the first solo exhibit of this once well-known, now nearly forgotten, painter.
Quite aside from the quality of his paintings, Lethière has a fascinating backstory, one that sheds some light on the complicated relations between revolutionary France and its Caribbean possessions.
He was the third illegitimate child (hence his last name, meaning “the third”) of Pierre Guillon, a white plantation owner in Guadaloupe, and Marie-Françoise Pepeye, a mixed-race woman, very possibly still enslaved at the time of Lethière’s birth.
As fate would have it, Guillon’s only legitimate son died before setting off for France with his father, and Lethière was able to go in his place. Once in France, he began his painting studies and soon showed enough talent to study in Rome, and then find his way into the corridors of power following the revolution.
Friendly with Napoleon’s brother Lucien, he became director of the French Academy in Rome, and he painted mammoth portraits of both Lucien’s wife and Napoleon’s consort Josephine, a fellow Creole. Both of these impressive, if somewhat vacuous, portraits are in the exhibition at the Clark.
Lethière’s real interest and gift, however, was for grand history paintings. The two massive Roman history paintings at the Louvre are too large to travel, but the Clark exhibit has numerous smaller studies and earlier versions of them.
Both works represent moments of heroic family sacrifice from early Roman history: Brutus ordering the execution of his traitorous sons, and Virginius stabbing his own daughter to save her from becoming the concubine of the powerful decemvir Appius Claudius.
Both stories are part of the legendary Roman past, recounted during the time of Augustus by the historian Titus Livy. As such, the stories have no serious claim to historical fact, but Livy’s narration shows us what Romans believed—and wanted to believe—about their heritage.
And they became, in turn, important stories for the French revolutionaries, who were every bit as ready as their Roman heroes to sacrifice their own family members for the sake of the public good.
The Clark gives us a number of early versions of the Brutus painting, as Lethière rearranged his tableau and apparently debated how graphic he should be in presenting the beheading of one of the sons.
But Lethière seemed especially fascinated by the story of Virginia, a story he continued to work on for more than thirty years. Less well-known (and less frequently painted) than the superficially similar narrative of Lucretia, this story tells of a centurion who kills his daughter rather than allow her to become the enslaved concubine of Appius Claudius, a more powerful nobleman. As with the Lucretia story, this sacrifice provides the impetus to overthrow powerful tyrants, in this case the decemvirs, to reestablish republican rule.
The wall cards and the catalog, however, tell the story slightly differently. And here’s where we run into a curatorial problem. According to the curatorial team, Virginia herself chose death and she did so in order not to become the decemvir’s slave. That is, in this version, Virginia is like her predecessor Lucretia in taking charge of the situation, and her decision to choose death is motivated by the dishonor of being enslaved.
The wall card suggests a reason for Lethière’s particular interest in this story:
Virginia’s story took on fresh political resonance in the revolutionary period and likely carried personal resonance for Lethière as the child of a woman who too was once enslaved.
But surely this begs the question. While it seems entirely possible, even likely, that Lethière’s mother was enslaved when he was born, clear evidence is lacking. She is described in one later document as a freed woman of mixed race (une mulâtresse affranchie), in another as a free woman of mixed race (une mulâtresse libre).
When I first visited the exhibition, this struck me as a bit of special pleading, and I was more than a little irritated by the curators’ misreading of Livy, not just in their giving agency to Virginia (a nod to feminism, I wondered?), but also by focusing on the dishonor of slavery rather than the violation of a women’s chastity.
Only when I went back and examined the catalog, did I see that it was Lethière himself who misread Livy. When the painter exhibited his finished work in 1831, just a year before he died, he added this comment to the Salon’s livret:
Appius Claudius, the leader of the decemvirs, who is in love with Virginia, has just declared that she was born to an enslaved woman, and enslaved herself, in order to be able to claim her for himself. After attempting in vain to shield her from this iniquitous ruling, Virginius, her father, consults with her, and when she answers that she prefers death to dishonor, seizes a knife from a nearby butcher’s stand, plunges it into her breast, pulls it out, covered with blood, and, furious, turns to the decemvir, crying, “With this innocent blood, I dedicate your head to the infernal gods.” [Catalog, p. 155]
Though the catalog notes that Lethière’s note is “derived from Livy and Valerius Maximus,” it fails to note the crucial changes: that Virginia is silent in both sources, and that the dishonor—assumed here to be slavery—was clearly understood by the Romans as a violation of a woman citizen’s virginity. (In case there’s any doubt, Valerius Maximus includes this narrative in his section titled “On Chastity.”)
Sadly, the curators have not just gotten it wrong here, they have missed an opportunity to buttress their own argument and fortify it against trolls like the National Review critic, who suggests that the whole exhibit, by foregrounding race, marks an entry in “the Oppression Olympics,” and that the Virginia story was unlikely to have resonated with Lethière because “[h]er story doesn’t much align with Lethière’s.”
It’s true: it doesn’t. But Lethière seems to have made a point of trying to align the story with his mother’s. Now that’s interesting!
This exploration began for me as a somewhat tedious complaint about the sorry state of classics knowledge among even our best educated art professionals. But it has developed into, I think, a much more interesting observation about how and why we get things wrong.
What’s interesting is not that the curators didn’t go back to check their Livy and Valerius Maximus. What’s interesting is that an important painter—intentionally or inadvertently—remade the story behind one of his most important paintings to tell us something about his mother.
Lethière’s epic work, the Death of Virginia, reflects the painter’s desire to remake his own mother as a powerful woman with agency, a woman willing to die in order to throw off the shackles of slavery.
It’s not Livy’s Virginia. It’s Lethiere’s.
Interesting! Thanks. Will try to get to the Clark to see this.