“French painter. He was the illegitimate son of a white government official and a freed black slave. While accompanying his father to France in 1774 Léthiere entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste Descamps at the Académie in Rouen, where he won a drawing prize for an académie in 1776. In 1777 he went to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, studying under Gabriel-Francios Doyen and winning a first-class medal in July 1782. Léthiere also produced historical landscapes, an increasingly popular genre at the time. Yet for all the diversity of his later years, Léthiere’s true vocation was to adhere fervently to Neo-classical principles.”

(Biographical Source: Turner, Jane, ed. The Dictionary of Art. New York: Macmillan Limited, 1996.)