🖌️🎨Guillaume Guillon Lethière (1760 - 1832) - French artist.

He was born in Sainte-Anne; he was the illegitimate son of the royal prosecutor in Guadeloupe, Pierre Guyon, from a mestizo freedwoman.
Being illegitimate, he did not have a surname or a name for a long time - he was called "Third" (French: Tiers), since he was the third child of the couple.
He spent his childhood in Guadeloupe, at the age of 14 he was sent by his father to France, where he studied first with Decamps in Rouen, and then, three years later, with Gabriel-François Doyen at the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. After receiving the Prix de Rome in 1786 (second place), he went to Rome for several years, where he became interested in classicism.
Returning to France, he founded his own art studio, which competed with the studio of Jacques-Louis David. In 1792, he accepted the ideas of the French Revolution, and in 1800, he accompanied Lucien Bonaparte to Madrid.
During the first years of the First Empire, his studio was located in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but in 1803, during a fight at a café, Guillaume killed an officer and was forced into exile in Prussia. Later, thanks to the patronage of Lucien Bonaparte, he became the head of the French Academy in Rome, holding this position from 1807 to 1816.
After the Restoration, Guillon-Lethière was left in his position by Louis XVIII.
In 1816 he returned to France, became a member and then director of the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1816 he reopened his studio in the same location and recruited new students, including Louis Boulanger.
In 1818 he was awarded the Legion of Honor and a teacher at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, and a year later he became a professor there. He made several long trips to Italy, England and Spain. He died of cholera in 1832.
The artist's work is mainly represented by canvases on biblical, mythological and historical (primarily on the themes of Ancient Rome, the French and Haitian revolutions) subjects.

Sources: pikuli.top, Wikiwand, Wikipedia.