On The Way to the Market

Wilson Bigaud is one of the great masters of Haitian painting. Working towards a mastery of color as well as an illusion of volume modeled in light and dark, Bigaud demonstrated a mature command of his art in the great Terrestrial Paradise (1952), painted when he was just 21 and subsequently purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1951 he was one of the handful of artists chosen to execute the landmark murals in the Episcopal Cathedral of Sainte Trinité, which were destroyed in the recent earthquake. His genre scenes are material rather than dreamlike, solid and respectful of the limitations of naturalism.