Michel-Jean Cazabon

Michel-Jean Cazabon is regarded as the first great Trinidadian painter and is Trinidad's first internationally known artist. He is also known as the layman painter. He is renowned for his paintings of Trinidad scenery and for his portraits of planters, merchants and their families in the 19th century. Cazabon's paintings are to be cherished not only for their beauty but also their historical importance: his painting has left us with a clear picture of the many aspects of life in Trinidad through much of the 19th century.
Cazabon relied on nature to expose the vistas which the plains of the Caroni and the tropical forests at Chaguaramas are idyllic in splendor. His portraits of the mulattoes, indentured Indians and Negroes were the bases of debate, about whether the painter immortalized these people because he felt a personal bond with them rather less than the European Creoles of which no stately portraits were ever recorded.
Cazabon preferred to describe himself as a "landscape painter", but in Trinidad, away from the metropolitan influences and stimuli, he embraced the everyday, often mundane, forms of artistic expression - teacher, illustrator, portrait painter.