Cazabon: New Perspectives

by Kenwyn Crichlow, Jackie Hinkson, Mark N Pereira

The work of the nineteenth-century artist Michel Jean Cazabon was rediscovered in the 1980s, when a biographical study and collections of his images were published and he was restored to his rightful place as the leading Trinidadian artist of his time. In the three decades since then, over 100 more of Cazabon’s works have been discovered, as well as others by contemporary artists, some of them also pupils of Cazabon’s. Many are reproduced here in full-colour plates.

This book was inspired by Mark N Pereira, the Port of Spain art dealer who has found many of Cazabon’s lost works—painted in Trinidad, around the region and in Europe, and now offered for sale all over the world—and brought them home.

But Cazabon: New Perspectives aims to do more than to show and to celebrate these hitherto unknown paintings. As the book’s title suggests, it examines Cazabon’s and other works and, further, his career and accomplishments, from fresh, varying points of view. Commentators including leading Trinidadian artists discuss Cazabon in the context of both the local and international art of the day, as well as the social and political upheavals taking place as he worked at his easel in the years after emancipation and the arrival of indentured Indians.

Offering a deeper understanding and appreciation of the skill, the style and the setting of Cazabon’s art, this is a timely and welcome addition to the study of a once-forgotten master.

124 pages, Hardcover

Published October 1, 2019