Baron Samedi Honored in a Voudou Ceremony

The Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, established in 1944 by American artist DeWitt Peters, revitalized the visual arts in Haiti. Functioning as an art school, an exhibition facility, and a commercial gallery, the Centre attracted trained artists who wanted to show and sell their work, as well as the uninitiated who wanted to take classes. Henri-Robert Brésil, who was born in the northern Haitian city of Gonaives, arrived in Port-au-Prince in 1973, and soon achieved world reknown, exhibiting in Haiti as well as in the United States, Puerto Rico, Japan, France, Italy, and Switzerland. His Landscape is executed in a naïve style that emphasizes surface patterning to create an overall decorative effect. The lush vegetation is articulated with discrete, controlled brushstrokes in lively colors that pop off the canvas. The landscape depicted is likely a plantation, given the presence of hunched laborers harvesting the bounty of the land. A note attached to the back of the frame describes the circumstances of its purchase by William S. Fairfield, of Sturgeon Bay. It reads: “Purchased directly from the artist H.R. Bresil in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1978. Price was $375 in local gallery, but Bresil repossessed it, added birds and tiled mountainsides for WSF, then sold it to him for $300.” The Fairfield Foundation also donated Baron Samedi Honored in a Voudou Ceremony, a painting by a lesser-known Haitian artist, Erick-Paul Hector. Baron Samedi is the head of the Gede family, the spirits of the dead. He is concerned with funerals and cemeteries and is usually associated with the skull and crossbones, as well as the cross, which marks the crossroads between the realms of the living and the dead. His cooperation is required to save an ancestor from magicians who would turn him into a zombie.