It’s an astonishing story. In 1760, a boy is born into slavery to a mixed-race enslaved woman and a wealthy French plantation owner on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. He is named “Guillaume,” for the saint on whose feast his birthday falls, and “Le Thière,” as his father’s third child. In 1832, when the distinguished artist Guillaume Lethière dies in Paris, he is eulogized at his funeral by the president of the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts and by the novelist Alexandre Dumas. Those dates bracket many of the most transformative events of French history: the storming of the Bastille, the execution of the French royal family, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise from first consul to emperor, his definitive fall, and the restoration of the monarchy—not to mention the French Republic’s abolition of slavery in the colonies and Napoleon’s restoration of the practice. Lethière’s own history is no less dramatic. At fourteen, as the only surviving male child after the death of his legitimate siblings, the emancipated Guillaume accompanies his father to France, where he will spend the rest of his life. He will later be officially recognized by his father, winning the right to inherit and to use the family name “Guillon,” but he will be known to art history as “Lethière.”

Some time after arriving in France, the boy enrolls at the École de dessin in Rouen. A precocious talent, he wins prizes and, in 1778, moves to Paris to enroll in the Académie