WILLIAMSTOWN — “The Oath of the Ancestors,” painted in 1822 by the French artist Guillaume Lethière, is a heroic vision of the birth of a nation, though not one he ever called home. A towering canvas depicts generals Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Jacques Dessaline, heroes of the Haitian Revolution, in crisp military regalia. Their hands rest on a stone inscribed with the ideals of their new freedom; broken shackles and chains lay at their feet. Their eyes are cast to the heavens, where a billowy God figure bestows divine grace upon them from above.
Lethière made it as a gift to the nation, and as a gesture of his solidarity with rising abolitionist and liberation movements. But it’s also an emblem of the artist’s own tangle of paradoxes. Lethière was born in 1760 in the French colony of Guadeloupe, where his mother, Marie-Françoise Pepeye, who was mixed race, had been enslaved. His father, Pierre Guillon, a wealthy white sugar plantation owner, didn’t officially recognize Lethière as his own until later in life, but doted on him nonetheless. Guillon took his son to Paris as a teen, where he became a central figure in both the thriving mixed-race Creole community and the French art establishment. Then, not long after his death in 1832, he was all but forgotten.
