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Lot Essay
Lucius Junius Brutus, who led a revolt to overthrow the last king of Rome and establish the Roman Republic in 509 B.C., was celebrated by Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophes and established as a foundational hero of the French Revolution. A revival of Voltaire’s play, Brutus, in Paris in November 1790, performed sixteen months after the fall of the Bastille and fourteen months after the first public exhibition of Jacques-Louis David’s masterpiece, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (1789), led to deafening shouts and fistfights on opening night between ardent Royalists and inspired Republicans, who could not help but recognize the contemporary political implications of Brutus’ cry, “Gods! Give us death rather than slavery!”
Lucius Junius Brutus (d. 509 B.C.), who lived 500 years before Julius Caesar’s notorious assassin, founded the Roman Republic in 508 B.C.; his first act as Consul, according to Livy, was to gather the citizenry to swear a sacred oath to never again allow any man to be king over the people of Rome. During his consulship, the royal family made an attempt to regain the throne through subversion and conspiracy. Among the conspirators were brothers of Brutus’ wife Vitellia, and Brutus’ two sons, Titus Junius Brutus and Tiberius Junius Brutus. The plot was discovered and the consuls determined to punish the traitors with death. Brutus was obliged to order and witness his sons’ execution, and his stoic acceptance of his fate, and concomitant devotion to the Republic above concerns for his family or personal happiness, became the central tenets of his legend.
Jacques-Louis David began discussing plans for his great painting as early as 1787, and preliminary drawings for it survive from that year. Remarkably, the neoclassical history painter Guillaume Lethière, a young follower of David who was living as a student at the French Academy in Rome at the time, completed the present painting - a small but remarkably accomplished, powerful and even savage rendering of the stoic subject - a full year before David finished his version.
Lethière’s biography is little short of remarkable. He was born on the island of Guadeloupe, the illegitimate son of a white government official and a freed black slave. Although his real name was Guillon, as the third child of the family he called himself Letiers, Lethiers and finally, from 1799, when officially recognized by his father, Lethière. While accompanying his father to France in 1774, he entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste Descamps at the Academy in Rouen, where he won a prize for drawing in 1776. The following year he moved to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Royale, studying under Gabriel-François Doyen and winning a first-class medal in July 1782. He competed for the Prix de Rome in 1784 and again the following year, by which time the influence of Pierre Peyron and David had superseded that of his teachers, and he embraced a full-throated neoclassicism. The critic Chaussard wrote that “although M. Le Thiers had begun as a pupil of M. Doyen, the School of David claimed him. Messieurs Le Thiers and [Jean-Germain] Drouais were the first who walked with honor along the path opened by this great master” (1806). He lost the Prix again in 1786, but gained the attention of the Comte de Montmorin, a diplomat and friend of Louis XVI, who persuaded the Académie that Lethière was worthy of a Roman pension; he arrived in Rome shortly thereafter.
Lethière executed the present painting in Rome and sent it back to Paris shortly afterward. A letter from Ménageot, the Director of the French Academy in Rome, dated 24 September 1788, praised the sketch for its beauty and expressiveness, but it is unclear how widely it would have been seen before it appeared in the Paris Salon of 1795 (no. 353) and again in the Salon of 1801 (no. 229). In both Salon exhibitions, the painting was criticized for the brutality with which the severed head of one of Brutus’ sons is held aloft by the executioner before the milling crowd. David would avoid this charge by choosing to depict the quiet moments after the executions, when the bodies of his sons are returned to Brutus; the critic Von Halem, having visited David’s studio in 1790, commented that “Lethière…showed the bloody head of one son. But one flees before blood and one suffers the double fear that the blood of the second son will be shed…. David has made the best choice. He has opted for the moment which follows the execution, and yet he has spared us the horrible sight of the place of execution.” It might be argued that in 1788, a year before the Revolution, Lethière portrayed a scene that was too violent for its time and that its implicit moral message was confused with an apology for political assassination, as J. Patrice Marandel has commented, while by 1795, after the bloodbath of the terror, the image was too emotionally charged and repulsive to many visitors. Several large compositional drawings by the artist in wash and ink are known for the painting, including a sheet in the Musée de Château-Gontier (measuring 60.2 x 90 cm.), which may have served as the model for the engraving by Coqueret, published in November 1794. (An impression of Cocqueret's print, and a small compositional study by Lethière for the painting, are being sold as part of the present lot).
In 1791, Lethière returned to Paris and opened a teaching studio in competition to that of David. In 1801, he travelled to Spain as artistic advisor to Lucien Bonaparte, who embarked on an affair with Lethière’s wife, fathering her illegitimate son. Returning to Paris, the artist became embroiled in a fight with a group of soldiers, one of whom he killed, prompting the government to forcibly close his studio. Driven out of Paris, Lethière and his family roamed Europe until 1807, when, through the influence of Lucien Bonaparte, the artist was appointed Director of the French Academy in Rome. Ingres was one of his pensionnaires, and the young artist produced a series of splendidly sympathetic portrait drawings of Lethière and all the members of his family. Removed from his post with the Restoration, Lethière reopened his studio in Paris. He was elected to the Institut in 1818 and was awarded the Legion d’honneur.
While in Rome in 1811, Lethière painted a large, variant version of the Brutus, using the present painting as the basis for the composition, exhibiting it at the Paris Salon of 1812 and in London in 1817. It was intended as the first painting in an ambitious series of four pictures set in the greatest eras of ancient Rome; ultimately, only Brutus Condemning his Sons to Death (fig. 1), and The Death of Virginia (both, Louvre, Paris) were completed. A committed, life-long revolutionary, whose interest in politics never waned, in 1822, Lethière painted an allegory to celebrate the independence of Haiti, The Oath of the Ancestors (Cathedral, Port-au-Prince, Haiti), in which the generals Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Jacques Dessalines are shown swearing the oath of the union that led to the nation’s freedom.
Lucius Junius Brutus (d. 509 B.C.), who lived 500 years before Julius Caesar’s notorious assassin, founded the Roman Republic in 508 B.C.; his first act as Consul, according to Livy, was to gather the citizenry to swear a sacred oath to never again allow any man to be king over the people of Rome. During his consulship, the royal family made an attempt to regain the throne through subversion and conspiracy. Among the conspirators were brothers of Brutus’ wife Vitellia, and Brutus’ two sons, Titus Junius Brutus and Tiberius Junius Brutus. The plot was discovered and the consuls determined to punish the traitors with death. Brutus was obliged to order and witness his sons’ execution, and his stoic acceptance of his fate, and concomitant devotion to the Republic above concerns for his family or personal happiness, became the central tenets of his legend.
Jacques-Louis David began discussing plans for his great painting as early as 1787, and preliminary drawings for it survive from that year. Remarkably, the neoclassical history painter Guillaume Lethière, a young follower of David who was living as a student at the French Academy in Rome at the time, completed the present painting - a small but remarkably accomplished, powerful and even savage rendering of the stoic subject - a full year before David finished his version.
Lethière’s biography is little short of remarkable. He was born on the island of Guadeloupe, the illegitimate son of a white government official and a freed black slave. Although his real name was Guillon, as the third child of the family he called himself Letiers, Lethiers and finally, from 1799, when officially recognized by his father, Lethière. While accompanying his father to France in 1774, he entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste Descamps at the Academy in Rouen, where he won a prize for drawing in 1776. The following year he moved to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Royale, studying under Gabriel-François Doyen and winning a first-class medal in July 1782. He competed for the Prix de Rome in 1784 and again the following year, by which time the influence of Pierre Peyron and David had superseded that of his teachers, and he embraced a full-throated neoclassicism. The critic Chaussard wrote that “although M. Le Thiers had begun as a pupil of M. Doyen, the School of David claimed him. Messieurs Le Thiers and [Jean-Germain] Drouais were the first who walked with honor along the path opened by this great master” (1806). He lost the Prix again in 1786, but gained the attention of the Comte de Montmorin, a diplomat and friend of Louis XVI, who persuaded the Académie that Lethière was worthy of a Roman pension; he arrived in Rome shortly thereafter.
Lethière executed the present painting in Rome and sent it back to Paris shortly afterward. A letter from Ménageot, the Director of the French Academy in Rome, dated 24 September 1788, praised the sketch for its beauty and expressiveness, but it is unclear how widely it would have been seen before it appeared in the Paris Salon of 1795 (no. 353) and again in the Salon of 1801 (no. 229). In both Salon exhibitions, the painting was criticized for the brutality with which the severed head of one of Brutus’ sons is held aloft by the executioner before the milling crowd. David would avoid this charge by choosing to depict the quiet moments after the executions, when the bodies of his sons are returned to Brutus; the critic Von Halem, having visited David’s studio in 1790, commented that “Lethière…showed the bloody head of one son. But one flees before blood and one suffers the double fear that the blood of the second son will be shed…. David has made the best choice. He has opted for the moment which follows the execution, and yet he has spared us the horrible sight of the place of execution.” It might be argued that in 1788, a year before the Revolution, Lethière portrayed a scene that was too violent for its time and that its implicit moral message was confused with an apology for political assassination, as J. Patrice Marandel has commented, while by 1795, after the bloodbath of the terror, the image was too emotionally charged and repulsive to many visitors. Several large compositional drawings by the artist in wash and ink are known for the painting, including a sheet in the Musée de Château-Gontier (measuring 60.2 x 90 cm.), which may have served as the model for the engraving by Coqueret, published in November 1794. (An impression of Cocqueret's print, and a small compositional study by Lethière for the painting, are being sold as part of the present lot).
In 1791, Lethière returned to Paris and opened a teaching studio in competition to that of David. In 1801, he travelled to Spain as artistic advisor to Lucien Bonaparte, who embarked on an affair with Lethière’s wife, fathering her illegitimate son. Returning to Paris, the artist became embroiled in a fight with a group of soldiers, one of whom he killed, prompting the government to forcibly close his studio. Driven out of Paris, Lethière and his family roamed Europe until 1807, when, through the influence of Lucien Bonaparte, the artist was appointed Director of the French Academy in Rome. Ingres was one of his pensionnaires, and the young artist produced a series of splendidly sympathetic portrait drawings of Lethière and all the members of his family. Removed from his post with the Restoration, Lethière reopened his studio in Paris. He was elected to the Institut in 1818 and was awarded the Legion d’honneur.
While in Rome in 1811, Lethière painted a large, variant version of the Brutus, using the present painting as the basis for the composition, exhibiting it at the Paris Salon of 1812 and in London in 1817. It was intended as the first painting in an ambitious series of four pictures set in the greatest eras of ancient Rome; ultimately, only Brutus Condemning his Sons to Death (fig. 1), and The Death of Virginia (both, Louvre, Paris) were completed. A committed, life-long revolutionary, whose interest in politics never waned, in 1822, Lethière painted an allegory to celebrate the independence of Haiti, The Oath of the Ancestors (Cathedral, Port-au-Prince, Haiti), in which the generals Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Jacques Dessalines are shown swearing the oath of the union that led to the nation’s freedom.