Guillaume Guillon-Lethiere. Guillaume Guillon-Lethière was a French Neoclassical painter.
   His 1787 painting, The Death of Socrates, is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. The Louvre holds his painting Saint Louis Distributing Alms under the Oak at Vincennes.
   He was born out of wedlock to Marie-Françoise Dupepaye, a free person of color, and Pierre Guillon, a colonial Royal Notary. He and his sister, Andrèze, could not be legally recognized as Guillon's children until 1794, when the Code Noir was abolished.
   In 1774, after displaying an early aptitude for art, his father took him to France, where he was placed with the painter Jean-Baptiste Descamps at the new free drawing school in Rouen. It was there that he adopted the name Lethière, derived from letier.
   He remained there for three years, then went to Paris and became a student of Gabriel François Doyen at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Those studies lasted until 1786. During that time, he paid frequent visits to the studio of Jacques-Louis David. He won second prize in the Prix de Rome of 1784 for his painting Woman of Canaan at the Feet of Christ. Two years later, he entered again and, while he did not win, he succeeded in receiving support to travel to Rome, where he further developed his Neoclassical style. In 1787, he also had a son out of wedlock with a woman named Marie-Agathe Lapôtre. In 1792, he returned to Paris and o
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