NO. 39 OF 61
Village Imaginaire
Préfète Duffaut (1923–2012)
$5,000
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Size
- 20 × 24 in
- Year
- 1994
- Price
- $5,000
Or email Haitianartdisplay@gmail.com
About the work
Great arched roads carry tiny walkers through the air. Préfète Duffaut repeatedly reinvented Jacmel as an imaginary city. Here, the smallest figures have the grandest routes, and the eye follows their extraordinary journey. Each connection opens another way through the view, making movement as absorbing as arrival and letting the pleasure of looking continue from one turn to the next.
Brightly coloured houses cover green, red and violet hills around a blue bay. Palms and small leafy trees dot the slopes, with sailboats on the water below.
About the artist
Préfète Duffaut was born in Jacmel on 1 January 1923. As a young man he worked with his father, a boatbuilder. In 1948 DeWitt Peters of the Centre d'Art bought his first drawings and urged him to invent his own subjects. In the early 1950s he was one of the painters chosen to paint the murals of the Episcopal Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. His main subject became the imaginary city, built on steep mountains and crossed by roads and bridges, alongside the Virgin Mary, Jacmel and mystical themes. The Spencer Museum of Art holds two of his cityscapes. He died on 6 October 2012.