This is the best summary I could come up with:
Born into slavery (or so it’s assumed, given his parentage and the telling absence of baptismal records), Lethière was brought to France by his father, the French king’s public prosecutor in Guadeloupe, in 1774, when he was 14.
He “won the esteem and friendship of everyone by his honesty, his politeness, and a frank and loyal character that never wavered,” wrote Francois-Guillaume Ménageot, the director of the French Academy.
In 1807, Lethière’s friendship with Lucien Bonaparte led directly to his appointment as director of the French Academy in Rome — an immensely prestigious post.
There he reinvigorated the academy and oversaw the training of dozens of France’s best artists — among them Ingres, who made a series of stunning drawings of Lethière’s family (included in the show), and a female pupil, Antoinette Cécile Hortense Lescot, who went on to exhibit more than 100 paintings in the Paris Salon.
After a risky and clandestine sea voyage, Lethière’s son personally delivered the painting to Haiti’s President Jean-Pierre Boyer in Port-au-Prince.
For all the stately arrangement of the Clark’s galleries and the superficial stiffness of Lethière’s neoclassical style, the exhibit is like a pinwheeling firecracker, blazing out light, knowledge and cultural energy, and deepening our understanding of a remarkable inheritance.
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