Michel-Jean Cazabon

Michel-Jean Cazabon (September 20, 1813 – November 20, 1888) 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.

In England and France his work was much admired and he won awards and medals at exhibitions. In 1851 and 1857 two books of his engravings of Trinidad landscapes were produced in Paris. He was the first Trinidad artist whose style influenced artists for many score years after his death. He was an assiduous worker. A few of his paintings and prints are to be found in the National Museum and Art Gallery and in private collections in Trinidad and abroad.

Jean Michael Cazabon was born of French `Martinique parentage in Trinidad on September 20, 1813 on Corinth Estate, Northern Naparima, on the outskirts of San Fernando. He was the youngest of four children. His parents, owners of a sugar plantation, were "free colored" immigrants from Martinique, who had come to Trinidad following the Cedula of Population of 1783.

In 1826, at the age of thirteen, Cazabon went to school at St. Edmund's College, Ware, England, returning to Trinidad in 1830. In about 1837 he sailed for Paris to study medicine. He gave up these studies and started off as an art student under Paul Delaroche a leading painter in Paris. His parents' wealth supported his pursuits and those of his family for many years in an enviable life-style and only later in life did he find it necessary to earn a living from his paintings.

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