Michel-Jean Cazabon

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Michel-Jean Cazabon (born September 20, 1813 in San Fernando , † November 20, 1888 in Port of Spain ) was a Trinidadian painter. He is considered the most important painter in the country and is one of the few colored painters of his time who gained recognition in colonial Europe.

Life

Cazabon was born as the youngest of four children of the sugar cane plantation owner Francois Cazabon on his parents' property Corinth Estate near San Fernando. His grandfather Dominique Cazabon came from Bordeaux and emigrated to Martinique , where he fathered three children with a black man, including Francois, who was thus a "Free Colored" according to the then applicable law, a mixed breed with certain rights. Francois Cazabon and his wife Rose migrated as part of the Cedula de populacion , an edict of the Spanish minister José de Gálvez y Gallardo , which in 1783 allowed the increased settlement of French citizens on the Spanish island of Trinidad until 1797 and thus a significant increase in population and a rapidly increasing economic output the island made it possible for her slaves to go to southern Trinidad to successfully grow sugar cane there.

Michel-Jean's parents separated a year after he was born, and he and his siblings grew up with their mother in San Fernando. At least his mother doesn’t seem to have been in a bad financial position because of the separation, because Cazabon received a solid education and was able to travel several times. French and patois were spoken in his childhood household , and he made numerous trips to the town's rural surroundings, a habit that he maintained throughout his life and that later influenced his career choices. From 1826 to 1830 he attended St. Edmund's College in Ware, England, near London. In 1837 his parents' plantation near San Fernando was sold, and Cazabon first moved to Port of Spain with his mother, but in the same year began studying medicine in Paris. However, he soon broke this off in favor of studying painting at the École des beaux-arts under Paul Delaroche , during which he undertook extensive trips through France. He studied in Rome for a few years, but then returned to Paris. In addition to Delaroche, Michel-Martin Drolling , Jean Antoine Théodore Gudin and Antoine Leon Morel-Fatio were other teachers of Cazabons. From 1839 he exhibited his own pictures. In 1843 he married the (white) French woman Louise Rosalie Trolard, who had three children from him between 1844 and 1853. In 1848 he turned his back on Europe for good because of the poor health of his mother and moved to Port of Spain; his family followed him in 1852.

In Trinidad he worked as a landscape and portrait painter, art teacher and illustrator for the London Illustrated News and local newspapers. From 1849 he gained some fame as a house painter for Governor George Harris and Thomas Cochrane . He had an intense friendship with Harris. During this time his well-known series of lithographs were created . In 1854 Harris took on a new position as governor of Madras . He took a significant number of Cazabon's works with him to decorate his family's ancestral home in Scotland and plunged the painter into a professional hole - a no small part of Cazabon's reputation was based on his friendship with Harris and the resulting occupation as a painter Chronicler of government affairs. Another unsatisfactory thing for Cazabon was the fact that, as a colored man, he was socially among his customers - slavery had only been abolished in Trinidad in 1834, and in the minds of the white upper class, for the most part, the old class prevailed. Cazabon became restless and made trips to Grenada , Martinique and Guyana . In the hope of recognition and urban flair, he moved with his family to Sainte Pierre , the then cultural center of Martinique, in 1862 , but was disappointed in both respects. After working for eight years as a commissioned painter for merchants and plantation owners as well as an illustrator for French-language newspapers and having produced a number of lithographic series, he returned to Trinidad in 1870, disaffected, and there he fell into alcohol. His wife died in 1885. In 1888, Cazabon died of a heart attack and was buried in Lapeyrouse Cemetery in Port of Spain.

One of Cazabon's descendants, Peter Shim (* 1950), works as a painter in Trinidad.

plant

Cazabon painted with both oil and water colors. His work is associated with the Barbizon School . His main subjects were landscapes and urban scenes from his homeland, Trinidad. In the composition of his landscape paintings he followed the teachings of William Gilpins . In the absence of alternatives, Cazabon represents the most important source for the representation of Trinidadian everyday life of his time, before the advent of photography. Major parts of his work are influenced by the friendship with George Harris, as Cazabon accompanied official events and private excursions of the governor and the events captured picturesque. Since traveling by land in Trinidad in the middle of the 19th century was very strenuous due to the lack of a suitable road network, Cazabon's landscape pictures mostly show scenes around Port of Spain and on the Chaguaramas peninsula , which was well developed for military reasons , but he also made individual trips to the south and east of the island, partly with Governor Harris, and painted there. People appear in Cazabon's pictures mostly only as accessories, since he had no training as a portrait painter and only rarely dealt with this topic. In the representation of the races living in Trinidad, there are subtle differences that corresponded to the zeitgeist of the time and were therefore desired by his customers, such as Trinidadians of Asian origin (then contemptuously referred to as "coolies") were portrayed as socially profound.

In 1839 and from 1843 to 1847, landscapes from his travels through France and Italy were exhibited in the Salon du Louvre . In 1851 and 1857 two books with copperplate engravings by Cazabons were published in Paris. The lithographic series Views of Trinidad (1851) and Album of Trinidad (1857) show landscapes and important buildings as well as their residents and visitors and capture the Trinidadian way of life of the time: Black and white people live in harmony with one another in front of the backdrop, despite the military tension lurking in the background impressive nature and neo-Gothic buildings. Peter Kahn, Professor of Art History at Cornell University , compared the series of pictures with the work of Giovanni Antonio Canal . Other works by Cazabons were published in the London magazine The Illustrated London News . In 1862 he published the lithograph series "Album of Demerara" with pictures of his travels to Guyana.

In 1902 a significant part of Cazabon's work was destroyed in the eruption of the Montagne Pelée in Martinique; A daughter of Cazabon also died in this accident.

reception

Cazabon is considered the most important painter in Trinidad. He is the first "Trinidadian" painter, that is, the first painter who was born there and whose center of life was on the island and who did not just spend time there. In addition, as a colored man, he does not stand for colonial Trinidad with Spanish or British characteristics, but for today's, colorfully mixed Trinidad. The National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago in Port of Spain has a permanent exhibition of works by Cazabons that were created between 1847 and 1857 and for which the Trinidadian government bought ten paintings at a Christie’s auction in 2015 . Another permanent exhibition takes place in Belmont House, the British ancestral home of the Harris family near Faversham , where Cazabon's biographer Geoffrey MacLean found the painter's pictures, which were brought to Scotland by George Harris in 1854, as part of his research in 1991. In 2002, works by Cazabons were shown as the centerpiece of the exhibition "A Challenging Endeavor: The Arts in Trinidad and Tobago" at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington. During his lifetime in Paris, he won the Prix ​​de Rome , which enabled him to study in Italy, and in 1886 he was awarded the gold medal of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London.

The novel Light Falling on Bamboo by the Trinidadian writer Lawrence Scott traces the life story of Cazabons from 1848.

gallery

  • Caroni River, Trinidad

  • In the 1st Boca

  • On the Caroni, Trinidad

  • Landscape, Trinidad

  • On the Siparia River

  • Souvenir of Laventille

literature

  • Geoffrey MacLean: Cazabon: An Illustrated Biography of Trinidad's Nineteenth Century Painter. (Aquarela Galleries, Port of Spain 1986, ISBN 9788459915557 )
  • Geoffrey MacLean: Cazabon: The Harris Collection. (MacLean Publishing, Port of Spain 1999, ISBN 9789768066169 )
  • Mark Pereira: Cazabon: New Perspectives (101 Art Gallery, Port of Spain 2019, ISBN 9789768280855 )

Web links

Commons : Michel-Jean Cazabon  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
  • Judy Raymond: Out of Sight . Essay on Cazabon's choice of subject in the Caribbean Review of Books.
  • Geoffrey MacLean: Michel-Jean Cazabon and Belmont Trust . Article in ARC Magazine about the discovery of the Cazabon pictures in Belmont House.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Anthony: Historical Dictionary of Trinidad and Tobago . Scarecrow Press, London 1997, ISBN 0-8108-3173-2 , pp. 148 .
  2. ↑ a b c AICA-SC.net: Michel-Jean Cabazon's bi-centenary celebration. Retrieved March 6, 2016 .
  3. ^ Gerard A. Besson: Michel Jean Cazabon. Retrieved March 14, 2016 . In: Caribbean History Archives
  4. ↑ CitizensForConservationTT.org: Introduction to the Art of Trinidad and Tobago. Retrieved July 18, 2020 .
  5. ^ Caribbean-Beat.com: The Measure of a Mann. Retrieved March 6, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Christies.com: Michael-Jean Cazabon: Bamboo Arch. Retrieved March 14, 2016 .
  7. ↑ a b c Caribbean-Beat.com: The Governor's Attic. Retrieved March 5, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Amar Wahab: Colonial Inventions: Landscape, Power and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad . Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-1-4438-1999-2 , pp. 232 .
  9. ↑ Selwyn Reginald Cudjoe: Beyond Boundaries: The Intellectual Tradition of Trinidad and Tobago in the Nineteenth Century . University of Massachusetts Press, Boston 2003, ISBN 978-1-55849-391-9 , pp. 149 .
  10. ↑ Michael Anthony: Historical Dictionary of Trinidad and Tobago . Scarecrow Press, London 1997, ISBN 0-8108-3173-2 , pp. 110 .
  11. ↑ Khara Persad: Celebrating T & T's 'first artist' . In: Trinidad Guardian . 19th September 2013.
  12. ↑ NMAG.gov.tt: Art Gallery ( Memento from January 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ CNC3.co.tt: Government buys 10 Cazabon paintings for $ 2 million. Retrieved March 14, 2016 .
  14. ↑ IADB.org: A Challenging Endeavor: The Arts in Trinidad and Tobago. Retrieved February 15, 2016 .
  15. ^ Olga J. Mavrogordato: Voices in the Street . Inprint Caribbean, Port of Spain 1977, pp. 51 .
  16. ↑ Selwyn Cudjoe: Michel-Jean Cazabon: The Making Of A West Indian Artist . In: Trinidad Express . January 11, 2013.
  17. ^ HistoricalNovelSociety.org: Light Falling on Bamboo. Retrieved February 21, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Cazabon, Michel-Jean
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Trinidadian painter
DATE OF BIRTH September 20, 1813
PLACE OF BIRTH San Fernando
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 1888
Place of death Port of Spain