His facility in seizing the resemblance of his sitter was evidently native, for when only thirteen years of age, without instruction of any kind, he left his parents, and established himself as a portrait painter first at Douai and afterwards at Arras.  In 1786 he went to Paris, where he lived until his death.  Here he painted a great number of pictures of small size, representing familiar scenes of the streets and of the homes of Paris, and an incredible number of portraits.

[Illustration:  THE PRINCESS VISCONTI.  FROM A PAINTING BY FRANCOIS-PASCAL-SIMON (BARON) GERARD.

The picture gives an interesting study of the costume of the First Empire, and is a work conceived in the style of the time when the recent publication of “Corinne” by Madame de Stael had influenced the popular taste.  The original painting is now in the Louvre.]

A valiant craftsman, happy in his work, following no school but that of nature, careless of official honor (which came to him only when, late in life, on the demand of the Academy, the government accorded him the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1833), his life was uneventful.  But his little pictures pleased the people who saw themselves so truthfully depicted, and to-day they are more highly esteemed than are the works of many of his at-the-time esteemed contemporaries.  He painted for seventy-two years, produced more than five thousand portraits, an incredible number of pictures and drawings, and died, his brush in hand, on January 5, 1845.  The little picture of the Arrival of a Diligence presents, with exquisite truthfulness, a Paris unlike the brilliant city of our day, the Paris where Arthur Young in his travels in 1812 notes the absence of sidewalks; a city inhabited by slim ladies dressed a la Grecque, and by high-stocked gentlemen content to travel by post.  It is a canvas of more value than the pretentious and tiresome historical compositions of the time, and suggests the reflection that many of the David pupils might have been better employed in putting their scientific accuracy of drawing to the service of rendering the life which they saw about them, instead of producing the arid stretches of academy models posing as Hector or Romulus.

Guillaume-Guillon Lethiere, a painter in whose veins there was an admixture of negro blood, would hardly have echoed the sentiments of this last paragraph, as he lived and worked in the factitious companionship of the Greeks and Romans.  So clearly, however, does the temperament of a painter inspire the character of his work that we may be glad that this was the case; for, of his school, Lethiere alone infuses into his classicism something of the turbulent life which marked his own character.

[Illustration:  THE COUNTESS REGNAULT DE SAINT-JEAN-D’ANGELY.  FROM A PAINTING BY BARON GERARD, IN THE LOUVRE.]