Guillaume Lethière is the big summer exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown in northwestern Massachusetts. Rural, pretty Williamstown is a culture hub on the Vermont border at the end of the Berkshires mountain range. Though the farthest flung draw for the New York summer people, the Clark’s summer extravaganza unofficially inaugurates the Berkshires’ season for art tourism.
Lethière (1760–1832) was, until the Clark and the Louvre joined in this show to survey his career, an unremembered history painter and portraitist working during the French Revolution and the Bonaparte era from the wee pharaoh’s rise to his Waterloo sunset. It’s here-and-there awkward but enriching. With Bastille Day nigh, it was a treat.
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