Born into slavery, he rose to the top of France's art world | Hacker News Reader

Born into slavery, he rose to the top of France's art world

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120 pointsprismatic31 comments

It mentions Dumas held a eulogy for him. Dumas father came from a similar family background: He was the son of a French nobleman and a Caribbean slave, and Dumas' grandfather bought his father free and brought him to France, where he ended up a general under Napoleon.

Came here to say this... The Black Count was such an illuminating read. It's surreal to think that Dumas' own father was the inspiration for writing Count of Monte Cristo.

Along these lines - the life story of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Petrovich_Gannibal, who was Alexander Pushkin's great grandfather, is jaw-dropping incredible to me. I'm really surprised a Hollywood movie hasn't been made about him.

Just read this... yes, what an amazing HBO mini-series his life would make!

Amazing

Unless there were gaping liberties taken with facts in that book, I can't for life of me fathom how that book still hasn't been made into a movie yet. It's amazing how one person was at the right place at the right time and at the wrong place at the wrong time in two very extreme ways in one lifetime.

https://archive.is/eAgFS

> “Le Thière” is French for “the third”

Is this true? I know modern French is troisième, but I'd never seen this before, so I googled. There seems to be nothing on the internet about it, and remarkably few matches for Thière beyond misspellings of théière (teapot), which makes me think the authors of this article just made this up.

Troisieme is the third when counting. “Tiers” is the third when taking a fraction.

I can only speak to modern french though.

That got me curious, and according to the French Wikipedia, he was originally called "Letiers" (with the same etymological explanation) before he renamed himself "Lethiers" and finally "Lethière". Seems to hold up.

"Tiers" can mean "third" in a sense other than fractions. E.g. Le Tiers-Etat (the Third Estate in the Ancien Regime) and "un tiers" ("a third party").

I like the photorealism in some of these images. They look somewhat like contemporary people even though it's more than 200 years ago.

People haven't changed much. We just wear cheaper clothes.

No disagreement about the excellent art.

Obviously clothing and hairstyles change. More recently, average BMI is higher, or people are more likely to be tattooed. I'm sure there's other differences that aren't coming to mind.

But even setting aside any of that, it's pretty rare that I see a portrait that old and I think it could conceivably be recent.

even the amount of tattoos depends on culture and region. lots of cultures around the world practice some form of tattooing. even the BMI thing varies somewhat because different BMIs are healthy for different ethnic groups.

This is a tangent to the mention of cultural BMI, but I recently came across these:

Ritual fattening of Massa men

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/32978275_Guru_-fatt...

Leblouh, the force feeding of girls to fatten them.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-tradition-leblouh-in...

Well the clothing and hairstyle in the top photo looks pretty modern to me

People haven't changed much over the last 2000 years I think, just different tools and terminologies

Its funny that you say that since photography was invented in France in that period. Was it the paintings that were photorealistic, or the photos that were painterly?

Mirrors did exists since a long time though.

You can substitute "photorealistic" with "looks like the square (or rectangle) picture in the mirror".

Turns out photographic pictures did capture that "image in the mirror" picture. Funnily enough, using... Mirrors.

> ... or the photos that were painterly?

The answer is simply no. The real world doesn't work like that: photons/mirrors/prisms/our eyes "capturing" photons. Physics vs dialectic if you want.

The nature of the photographic mechanism becomes a new definition of “reality,” but it is still a cultural byproduct, leaving Realness to be still uncovered in all kinds of ways

> You can substitute "photorealistic" with "looks like the square (or rectangle) picture in the mirror".

Reflections in the mirror have depth and motion. Even without the viewer or the subject moving, the viewer can see depth in the mirror that isn't in a photo. In those respects, photos are more like paintings than mirrors. Of course, in other respects, they're more like mirrors.

In early photography history there was a pictorialist movement where people used special sort focus lenses to introduce more of a painterly quality. These lenses, such as Rodenstock Imagon still exist and are sought after.

So what you’re saying is that the mirror is the measure, and that the projections based on photons, etc. are fundenmentally evidenced by the form of the mirror image?

For how photorealistic paintings can be made with little painting skill, a setup with mirrors, and lots of patience:

Tim's Vermeer https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388

It's currently closed for renovation and set to reopen in November but if you have a chance to go see the Frick Collection in New York, I strongly recommend it for two of the most photorealistic paintings I've ever seen: the portraits of Sir Thomas More [1] and Thomas Cromwell [2] by Hans Holbein the Younger (sadly the digitized versions are low resolution and don't do them justice).

The paintings are 500 years old but look like photographic portraits, down to the individual hairs in the stubble on More's chin. Realism was in vogue at the time but there weren't many other artists who were as good as Hans Holbein.

[1] https://collections.frick.org/objects/100/sir-thomas-more

[2] https://collections.frick.org/objects/101/thomas-cromwell

Thats an obsessive level of detail for that era. Later Rembrandt's school were focusing more on the play of shadows on given subject and its surroundings, but most of the details were not to this level, at least not those I've seen up close (but still some parts were pretty crazy, ie embroidered collar or vein structure of wrinkled skin of an old woman).

Last time I was in New York I had lunch not far from there. Noted for next time.

You wouldn't be interested in him as neoclassicist, academist, even professor at Beaux Arts today, because that period is totally uninteresting at all. If not how they suppressed the independent artists, romantics those days. In England or Germany much more interesting painters were celebrated those days, who won over those salon academics.

The Wikipedia page for him, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Guillon-Lethi%C3%A8r..., states that he was not born into slavery, but instead:

> He was born out of wedlock, to Marie-Françoise Dupepaye, a free person of color, and Pierre Guillon, a colonial Royal Notary.

The source for that sentence states his mother was "une esclave affranchie noire" - a freed black slave.

May seem like a small detail, and I'm not sure the Wikipedia page is correct, but I think it's worth correcting the reporting if it is.

The article does discuss this, and the main point to understand is that his mother was a slave and was then emancipated, meaning any children she had prior to emancipation were born into slavery. The article says that his father emancipated both his mother and him. It does not state that there is 100% definitive evidence of his status at birth but given his mother's status and the lack of baptismal records for his birth, it is very likely he was born a slave.

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