May 7, 2024
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CLARK ART INSTITUTE OPENS FIRST EXHIBITION EVER PRESENTED ON THE WORK OF GUILLAUME LETHIÈRE
Exhibition examining the life and career of little-known Caribbean-born artist
will travel to the Louvre Museum after presentation at the Clark
Williamstown, Massachusetts—The Clark Art Institute presents the first monographic exhibition of Caribbean-born artist Guillaume Lethière. Organized in partnership with the Musée du Louvre, the exhibition celebrates Lethière’s extraordinary career and sheds new light on the presence and reception of Caribbean artists in France during his lifetime. Guillaume Lethière opens June 15 and is on view at the Clark through October 14, 2024. The exhibition then travels to Paris where it will be presented at the Musée du Louvre from November 13, 2024 through February 17, 2025.
Born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832) was a key figure in French painting during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The son of a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman of mixed race, Lethière moved to France with his father at age fourteen. He trained as an artist and successfully navigated the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath to achieve the highest levels of recognition in his time. A favorite artist of Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte, Lethière served as director of the Académie de France in Rome, as a member of the Institut de France, and as a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. A well-respected teacher, he operated a robust studio that rivaled those of his most successful contemporaries.
"Bringing this exhibition together has been a remarkable experience for our curatorial team,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark. “The research, the discoveries, and the detective work involved in bringing together such a large exhibition have been a wonderful adventure for all of us. We hope that this exhibition will inspire a new appreciation of Lethière’s work and a deeper exploration of a fascinating period in time.”
Esther Bell, the Clark’s deputy director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator, led the Clark’s curatorial effort with Meslay. Developed over the course of five years, the exhibition features some 100 works of art, including paintings, drawings, and sculpture.
“Guillaume Lethière’s journey from his childhood in Guadeloupe to the pinnacle of artistic success in France is an incredible story,” Bell said. “Lethière was one of the most respected painters of his time, yet his influence and achievements are not well known today. His considerable body of work deserves to be studied and celebrated. We are truly excited to bring his art to light.”
This exhibition marks a rewarding collaboration between the Clark and the Louvre. Marie-Pierre Salé, chief curator in the Louvre’s Department of Drawings will lead the Louvre’s presentation of Guillaume Lethière, opening in Paris on November 13, 2024. The Louvre and the Clark are the only venues for the exhibition.
“We are deeply indebted to the Louvre and its wonderful curatorial team for their participation in this project,” said Meslay.
ORIGINS: GUADELOUPE
Born on January 10, 1760, in Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière was the third child of Pierre Guillon, a white plantation owner and procureur du roi, or the king’s public prosecutor, and Marie-Françoise Pepeye, a woman of mixed race. They had two other children, a son known only as “Chouchout,” who died in infancy, and a daughter, Andrèze Césarine Talence. The absence of any record of Lethière’s or his siblings’ baptisms suggests that Pepeye was enslaved at the time of their birth; Lethière and his siblings would therefore have been born enslaved. He received the name Guillaume according to his patron saint’s feast day; the surname “Le Thière” (the third) indicates he was his father’s third natural child. Legally recognized as his father’s heir in 1799, he adopted Guillon’s surname—though he continued to use Lethière as well.
Lethière’s father was the proprietor of a sugar plantation in Sainte-Anne which remained in operation until 1940, ultimately as a distillery. Lethière was likely raised on this plantation. Archaeological records indicate that the plantation was relatively small-scale, with about fifteen dwellings housing approximately forty enslaved workers, likely including Marie-Françoise Pepeye.
EARLY FORMATION
In September 1774, Lethière traveled to France with his father. Lethière enrolled at the École gratuit de dessin in Rouen, a public school for the training of artists, artisans, manual laborers, and technicians. He quickly distinguished himself there, winning successive drawing prizes for his académies, or figure studies. Lethière’s quick facility in drawing suggests that he may have already begun his artistic training in Guadeloupe, where several itinerant European artists offered instruction. His red-chalk drawing of a model in the process of turning away, Académie (1776, Bibliothèque municipale de Rouen), earned Lethière a drawing prize in 1776. Such early academic prizes helped Lethière to secure a place at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) in Paris—the preeminent training ground for ambitious history painters. By 1784, he began to vie for the Grand Prix de Rome, a highly competitive history painting competition that offered its laureate a pension to study at the Académie de France in Rome. Lethière placed second that year with Woman of Canaan at the Feet of Jesus Christ (1784, Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers) and participated again in two subsequent competitions. Through the continued support of powerful allies, some with connections to the Caribbean, he was awarded the coveted pension in 1786.
REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS AND ROME
Lethière was a pensionnaire (resident student artist) at the Académie de France in Rome from 1786 to 1791, where he studied the city’s architecture and surrounding landscape as well as classical and Renaissance art. Students at the Académie were required to send annual envois, examples of their artistic progress, back to Paris for judgement. Lethière’s envois represent the beginnings of an ambitious project to represent the history of Rome in four episodes. Two compositions, Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death and Death of Virginia, would come to define Lethière’s career.
Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death tells the story of Lucius Junius Brutus, who orchestrated a revolt to overthrow the last king of Rome and establish the Roman Republic in 509 BCE. When his own sons conspired to overthrow the Republic, Brutus was forced to order and witness their executions. His stoic acceptance of their fate and devotion to the Republic over family inspired many artists at the dawn of the French Revolution. An early study included in the exhibition, Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death (c. 1788, Clark Art Institute), shows Lethière actively working out the ambitious composition in loose brushwork. Paper pasted over certain elements attests to his reworking of the sheet. In an oil sketch painted shortly after the drawing (1788, Clark Art Institute), Lethière eliminated the scourge and birch rod, instruments of torture featured prominently in the foreground of earlier drawings and covered the decapitated body in a white sheet. Critics still reacted to the bloodiness of the scene, especially the grotesque nature of the severed head held aloft by one of the executioners, which undoubtedly struck a chord with a French public so recently traumatized by the French Revolution’s bloody guillotine. Painted before the onslaught of the Revolution, Lethière’s composition is eerily prescient in its moralizing message and its brutal iconography. Brutus’s willingness to prioritize the interests of his country above his own made him an exemplar of Republican duty and stoicism. The tale inspired Voltaire and other leaders of the French Enlightenment to establish Brutus as a foundational hero of the French Republic. Lethière’s final version, painted in 1811, a monumental 25-foot canvas in the collection of the Musée du Louvre, omits the gruesome detail of the severed head.
Alongside his artistic progress, Lethière established a lasting social network while in Rome. Toward the end of his stay in the Italian capitol, the director of the Académie de France in Rome, François-Guillaume Ménageot reported that Lethière had “won the esteem and friendship of everyone by his honesty, his politeness, and a frank and loyal character that never wavered.” Landscape Album (Clark Art Institute) contains more than ninety drawings, featuring walled Italianate cities, botanical studies, and sweeping vistas. These works were likely executed by Lethière during his time in Rome, first as a student (1786–91) and later as the director of the Académie de France (1807–16). The album also contains work by contemporaries and friends, attesting to the friendships Lethière forged in Rome.
As Lethière completed his studies in Rome, the violent French Revolution was underway back home. Although distanced from the political and social upheaval, Lethière’s work made in Rome and in the years following his return clearly demonstrates his engagement with the revolutionary ideas animating the period. A highly symbolic drawing likely inspired by the celebrations of the French Republic’s first anniversary, Liberty and Equality United by Nature (1793, Musée de la Révolution Française, Domaine de Vizille) depicts the allegorical figures of Equality and Liberty framed by busts of the two Brutuses— Lucius Junius, the elder Brutus, who founded the Roman Republic, and Marcus Junius, the younger Brutus, who attempted to save it from becoming an empire by assassinating Caesar.
RETURN TO PARIS
Upon Lethière’s return to Paris in 1792, he embarked upon a generative decade of artistic production—exhibiting history paintings and portraits regularly in the public Salon exhibitions to critical success. This period was rife with societal changes: the king and queen of France were publicly executed, the monarchy was abolished and the French Republic was born, and slavery was abolished in the colonies. Despite the political turmoil, Lethière’s career took flight, and he established an active studio in Paris and became one of the most prominent artists of the period.
Lethière’s many Salon entries included Erminia and the Shepherds (1795, Dallas Museum of Art), an early example of the Troubadour genre, which featured scenes from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Set during the First Crusade (1096–99), the story tells of the Muslim princess Erminia who falls in love with the Christian knight Tancred and is forced to flee Jerusalem disguised as a soldier. Exhibited at the Salon of 1798, Frieze Representing the Neuf Thermidor (July 27, 1794) (1795, Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva) represents the political uprising when Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins—the extremist political group formed during the French Revolution—were ousted from government ending their Reign of Terror. The drawing demonstrates Lethière’s skill as a draftsman as well as his direct engagement with the violent and tumultuous politics of his time. Exhibited in the Salon of 1799, Woman Leaning on a Portfolio (c. 1799, Worcester Art Museum) is among Lethière’s most arresting portraits. It represents Lethière’s stepdaughter, Eugénie Servières (1783–1855), who after training in his studio, went on to have a successful career as a professional artist.
Louis-Léopold Boilly’s (1761–1845) iconic group portrait Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio (1798, Musée du Louvre) features images of thirty-one of the most prominent and influential artists under the French Directory gathered in the studio of fellow painter Jean-Baptiste Isabey. Lethière’s presence in the painting, near center in a bright red cloak, underscores the central place Lethière had come to occupy in the artistic world of his time.
Amidst his artistic success, Lethière was finally legally recognized by his father Guillon in 1799. In a letter to his son, Pierre Guillon writes: “This document is a declaration to you, my friend, of the certainty of my paternity and my desire to pass on my name and property to [you].”
LETHIÈRE AND THE BONAPARTES
In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup and appointed himself First Consul, marking the end of the French Revolutionary period and heralding the era of Napoleonic France. In 1802, Napoleon reinstated slavery in the French colonies, which had been abolished during the French Revolution, and, in 1804, he and his wife Joséphine were crowned Emperor and Empress of the French.
Napoleon’s younger brother, Lucien Bonaparte, became an especially close ally and patron of Lethière. During Lucien’s tenure as the French ambassador to Spain from 1800 to 1801, Lethière accompanied him as his artistic advisor and helped build his collection of Spanish paintings. Although Lucien and his brother were not politically or socially likeminded, Lucien’s support facilitated connections with the imperial family that were instrumental in elevating Lethière’s social and artistic status. The now mature painter managed to secure important commissions for history paintings and portraits of the Bonapartes. Among these was a portrait of the newly coronated Empress Joséphine.
In 1806, the Corps législatif (imperial legislative body) commissioned Lethière to make an official portrait of Empress Joséphine. Born and raised in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique until the age of sixteen, Josephine was one of the most famous Creole women of her time. In Joséphine, Empress of the French (1807, Musée des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon), she is depicted in her coronation costume. Despite the grandeur of the scene and the frontal orientation of the figure, Lethière infuses life into the portrait through Empress Joséphine’s gentle, serpentine posture.
CARIBBEAN CIRCLES
Lethière played a central role in the Caribbean community living in Paris at the time. One nineteenth-century writer described Lethière’s home as “open to all Creoles.” In the French Caribbean in this period, the term Creole was used to denote any person born in the French colonies of European, African, or mixed European and African ancestry like Lethière.
Lethière was close friends with the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (1762–1806), who hailed from Saint-Domingue. Like Lethière, Dumas traveled to France at age fourteen and achieved great military success. Dumas was the father of celebrated novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), author of numerous notable works including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. In his memoirs, Alexandre Dumas recalled the friendship between the two men, as well as the warm welcome he too received in Lethière’s home. Portraits of both Dumas father and son are included in the exhibition.
Beyond Lethière’s immediate connections, a larger Caribbean community made up of notable artists, cultural figures, and political actors, took shape in mainland France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Joseph Bologne, for example, known as the Chevalier de Saint-George, was, like Lethière, born in Guadeloupe to a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman and came to France at a young age. He became a renowned violinist, composer, fencer, and equestrian. In Alexandre-Auguste Robineau’s commanding portrait (1787, Royal Collection Trust), the Chevalier brandishes his sword and assumes a confident stance of challenge or triumph.
LETHIÈRE’S DIRECTORSHIP AT THE ACADÉMIE DE FRANCE IN ROME
His loyalty to Lucien Bonaparte, and to his family, resulted in a seminal milestone in Lethière’s career in 1807: his appointment as director of the Académie de France in Rome, the leading French academy outside of Paris. Lethière’s new position of pedagogical power was a career coup. When he arrived in October 1807, however, he found the institution and its physical structure in a state of disrepair. The school had recently moved from the Palazzo Mancini to the Villa Medici, where the gardens were in disarray, its fountains were inoperable, and the rooms were sparsely furnished. The students were underfunded and lacked discipline. Under Lethière’s leadership, the institution once again found sure footing, and students such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) thrived.
During his Roman directorate, Lethière undertook three of the most technically ambitious paintings of his career. Lethière’s Judgment of Paris (1812, private collection), with a proliferation of polished forms and carefully articulated landscape, represents the artist’s turn to grand large-scale paintings. He also completed the lyrical Homer Singing His Iliad at the Gates of Athens (1814, Nottingham City Museums and Galleries), and the monumental version of Brutus Condemning his Sons to Death (1811, Musée du Louvre). He exhibited the latter two to much fanfare in London from 1816 to 1819.
REVOLUTION IN THE COLONIES
In parallel with the revolution unfolding in mainland France, revolution erupted in its colonies. Guadeloupe witnessed three uprisings in the early part of the decade, including a 1793 revolt in Saint-Anne, where Lethière had spent his childhood and where his father still owned a plantation.
In August 1791, enslaved people revolted in the northern province of what was then French-controlled Saint-Domingue, sparking a struggle for liberation that ended in 1804 when Saint-Domingue became the first country of formerly enslaved people to achieve independence. The historic moment was symbolized by adopting what had been the Indigenous name for the island of Hispaniola: Haiti. The exhibition includes early representations of key figures in the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, Alexandre Pétion, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. Swearing in of President Boyer before the Palace of Haiti (c. 1818, Clark Art Institute) by Adolphe-Eugène-Gabriel Roehn (1760–1867), depicts the moment of Boyer’s inauguration as the second president of the Republic of Haiti on April 1, 1818. The celebratory scene takes place in front of the National Palace on the Place Pétion, named after Boyer’s predecessor Alexandre Pétion (today known as the Champs de Mars or Place des Héros de l'Indépendance). The red and blue bicolor flag of Haiti blows at center and the royal palm tree, a symbol of Haiti, stands at left.
Following his father’s death in 1800, Lethière inherited his plantation in Guadeloupe. Although he sold his portion in 1809, the deed of sale allowed for delayed payments due to the continued unrest in the colonies, meaning that Lethière continued to receive profits from the plantation through the end of his life. In contradiction with his involvement in the plantation economy, Lethière was involved in the abolitionist movement taking shape in mainland France. This abolitionist sentiment is distilled in Oath of the Ancestors (1822, Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien), a painting celebrating Haitian independence, which Lethière gifted to the nation in 1822.
OATH OF THE ANCESTORS
Lethière’s seminal Oath of the Ancestors celebrates the alliance of two of Haiti’s founding revolutionaries, the mixed-race general Alexandre Pétion and the Black general Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The 1802 coalition formed by the two men against French forces would prove to be a decisive moment in Haiti’s battle for independence, declared in 1804. This triumphant painting celebrates the former colony’s independence and the abolition of slavery, and it demonstrates Lethière’s personal identification with the Caribbean and his pride in the oath undertaken by these two men. Lethière painted the canvas in 1822, after Pétion’s successor President Jean-Pierre Boyer unified the country. Lethière’s son Auguste sailed to Haiti to personally deliver the painting to Boyer himself. Since France had not yet recognized Haiti’s independence, this journey was dangerous and conducted covertly.
The painting was originally installed in the Ancienne Cathédrale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and was later moved to the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de L'Assomption, where it remained until the 1990s. In 1995, it was restored and exhibited in France, then exhibited in Guadeloupe in 1998 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the French abolition of slavery before being returned to Haiti, where it was installed in the Presidential Palace. After sustaining extensive damage in Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, it was once again restored. Today, it remains an incredible artifact commemorating Haitian independence.
“The Oath of the Ancestors is a symbol of freedom for the Haitian people that lives deep in the heart of our memory,” said contemporary Haitian artist Jean-Claude Legagneur, director of the Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien (MUPANAH).
Although MUPANAH generously agreed to lend Oath of the Ancestors to the exhibition, current conditions in the country have temporarily prevented the painting from traveling. If the artwork is not able to be sent to the Clark, the exhibition will include a special commemoration of the significance of this national treasure.
STUDENTS AND INFLUENCE
As the head of a formidable studio, the director of the Académie de France in Rome from 1807 to 1816, and a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts beginning in 1819, Lethière was a lifelong teacher and took an active interest in mentoring the artists of the next generation. Occupying a few different addresses over the course of his career, Lethière’s Parisian studio rivalled those of his eminent contemporaries Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), both for the number and success of his students. Lethière’s students frequently won the coveted Grand Prix de Rome in the categories of history painting and historical landscape painting.
Many of Lethière’s students had ties to the Caribbean, including the painters Jean-Abel Lordon (1801–1876) and Jean-Baptiste-Adolphe Gibert (1806–1889). In addition, a number of young women, with family connections to the Caribbean, trained with the artist from a very young age and went on to have successful careers as professional artists. Genre painter and portraitist Antoinette Cécile Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot (1784–1845) began her studies with Lethière at the age of seven. She accompanied Lethière to Rome following his appointment as director of the Académie de France and remained there until 1816. In Rome, she observed Italian customs and costumes in great detail. Wedding Trip (1825, Clark Art Institute) demonstrates the lasting influence her time in Italy had on her artistic practice. One of Lethière’s most successful pupils, Haudebourt-Lescot exhibited over 100 paintings at the Salon.
LATE CAREER
During the final part of his career, Lethière continued to receive important state commissions and to exhibit frequently at the Paris Salon in the genres of landscape, historical landscape, and Troubadour painting. Lethière also returned to the classical subject of Death of Virginia, originally envisioned and first exhibited in 1795. He created numerous drawings and oil sketches, on view in the exhibition, in preparation for the monumental painting, now housed at the Musée du Louvre. Lethière exhibited the finished painting in London in 1828 and then at the Paris Salon of 1831. In the Salon booklet, Lethière described the history painting’s subject, Virginia as “born to an enslaved woman, and enslaved herself,” underscoring the story’s themes of enslavement, justice, and family.
One of Lethière’s final paintings, Lafayette Introducing Louis-Philippe to the People of Paris (1830–31, Tokyo Fuji Art Museum) depicts the Marquis de Lafayette, a key figure in the French and American Revolutions, and the new monarch Louis Philippe embracing on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris following the July Revolution, a three-day popular uprising that led to the overthrow of King Charles X, the French Bourbon monarch, and the ascent of his cousin Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans. Phillipe is pictured alongside the tricolor flag, helping facilitate the people’s acceptance of him as their new monarch. After representing the day’s events and energetic crowds in an oil sketch, Lethière received a commission from the new king to paint a large-scale version. The unfinished canvas was in his studio at the time of his death the following year.
Following the artist’s death on April 21, 1832, François Debret, president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and Alexandre Dumas delivered the eulogies at Lethière’s funeral. While Guillaume Lethière has fallen out of many art historical accounts of the period and into relative obscurity in mainland France, his legacy has been steadily championed in Guadeloupe.
ABOUT THE CATALOGUE
The exhibition is accompanied by a 432-page catalogue, Guillame Lethière, with contributions by Esther Bell, Alain Chevalier, Natasha Coleman, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Frédéric Lacaille, Anne Lafont, Christelle Lozère, Sophie Kerwin, Mehdi Korchane, C.C. McKee, Olivier Meslay, Marie-Isabelle Pinet, Frédéric Régent, Marie-Pierre Salé, Aaron Wile, and Richard Wrigley. The catalogue is published by the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts and distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Lavishly illustrated and authoritative, the groundbreaking study serves to introduce Lethière to new and broader audiences and restore him to his rightful place as one of the leading artists of his generation. An international group of scholars offers the first comprehensive view of Lethière’s extraordinary career in its political, social, and art historical context, addressing issues of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora, as well as shedding new light on the presence and reception of Caribbean artists in France during this time.
RELATED EVENTS
Opening Lecture: Guillame Lethière
Saturday, June 15, 11 am
Auditorium, Manton Research Center
Co-curators Esther Bell and Olivier Meslay discuss their research and the work that went into creating the exhibition. Free.
Extended Summer Hours
Enjoy free late-night access to Guillaume Lethière along with varied entertainment programs celebrating the exhibition. Admission is free from 5-9 pm on Wednesdays from June 19–September 25.
Public Programs
A full slate of public programs, including curatorial lectures, dance performances, artist conversations, artmaking workshops, and gallery tours is planned throughout the run of the exhibition; details are available at clarkart.edu/events.
Guillaume Lethière is co-organized by the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and curated by Esther Bell, deputy director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator; and Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director; with the assistance of Sophie Kerwin, curatorial assistant, at the Clark; and by Marie-Pierre Salé, chief curator in the Department of Drawings at the Louvre.
Guillaume Lethière is made possible by Denise Littlefield Sobel and the Mellon Foundation. Major funding is provided by Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy Demands Wisdom; with additional support from Charles Butt, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition and its accompanying materials do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
ABOUT THE CLARK
The Clark Art Institute, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is one of a small number of institutions globally that is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. Opened in 1955, the Clark houses exceptional European and American paintings and sculpture, extensive collections of master prints and drawings, English silver, and early photography. Acting as convener through its Research and Academic Program, the Clark gathers an international community of scholars to participate in a lively program of conferences, colloquia, and workshops on topics of vital importance to the visual arts. The Clark library, consisting of some 300,000 volumes, is one of the nation’s premier art history libraries. The Clark also houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
The Clark, which has a three-star rating in the Michelin Green Guide, is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its 140-acre campus includes miles of hiking and walking trails through woodlands and meadows, providing an exceptional experience of art in nature. Galleries are open 10 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Sunday, from September through June, and daily in July and August. Admission is free January through March and is $20 from April through December; admission is free year-round for Clark members, all visitors age 21 and under, and students with a valid student ID. Free admission is also available through several programs, including First Sundays Free; a local library pass program; and the EBT Card to Culture. For information on these programs and more, visit clarkart.edu or call 413 458 2303.
ABOUT THE MUSÉE DU LOUVRE
The Louvre bears witness to eight centuries of French history. From the time of its founding in 1793, the museum was intended to be universal. Its collections, among the finest in the world, span several thousand years and an area stretching from America to the confines of Asia.
The Louvre began as a fortress with thick defensive walls, built in 1190 during the reign of Philippe Auguste. It became a royal residence in 1364 and was modified over the centuries according to changing styles and royal preferences. The Grande Galerie was built between 1595 and 1610, during the reign of Henri IV.
In 1791, during the French Revolution, it was decreed that the Louvre should become a museum of the arts. The Muséum Central des Arts was inaugurated in 1793, and thereafter the palace was increasingly given over to the museum collections and their display to the public.
The Louvre is a universal museum with nine curatorial departments: Egyptian Antiquities; Near Eastern Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities; Paintings; Sculptures; Decorative Arts; Prints and Drawings; Islamic Art; and now Byzantine and Eastern Christian Art. Some 33,000 works of art are on display, including world-famous masterpieces such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Seated Scribe, the Winged Bulls of Khorsabad, the Mona Lisa, and Michelangelo’s Slaves; parts of the palace, such as the Napoleon III Apartments, are works of art in their own right. For more information, visit louvre.fr/en.
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