Michel Jean Cazabon – Thought to be The bridge over the Maraval River on Champs Elysées Estate at the entrance to the Maraval Valley, near Port of Spain.

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Watercolour heightened with white and scratching out.

Image: 8 5/8 x 12 in. (22 x 30.5 cm.)

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Cazabon, Michel-Jean (1813–1888)

Description

This painting is thought to be looking south toward the bridge over the Maraval River on Champs Elysées Estate at the entrance to the Maraval Valley, near Port of Spain. The estate was owned by the de Boissiere family.

The red immortelle trees were planted to protect the cocoa trees on the estate and can still be seen today on the hills to the left, more than 150 years after this watercolour was painted.

This watercolour reflects the intensity of the colours of the tropics, familiar in so many of the paintings of Michel-Jean Cazabon.

The year 2013 marked the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Michel Jean Cazabon, Trinidad’s great nineteenth Century artist, who was born on the 20th September 1813 on Corinth Estate near San Fernando, Trinidad’s second port.

The Cazabon name originates in Basque country, which spans north-eastern Spain and south-western France. Bordeau in France, the nearest large port to the region, was the point of departure for many of the French immigrants to the West Indies and North America. It is thought that the first Cazabons in the West Indies went to the French island of Martinique; records indicate that the family had settled there as early as the 1730s.

The artist’s mother, Rose Debonne, married Francois Cazabon in Trinidad about 1797, bringing into the marriage the 270-acre Corinth Estate in North Naparima. Their families were part of the free coloured/free black community from St. Pierre in Martinique, who settled in the Naparimas under the Spanish Government’s Cedula of Population. The Decree was designed to encourage immigration into an undeveloped Trinidad at the end of the eighteenth Century.

The new immigrants soon established a thriving sugar industry. San Fernando, the port from which their produce was shipped, developed rapidly under the leadership of Jean Baptiste Jaillet, an astute coloured planter who gained wealth and power through his land dealings. He used his influence to encourage other coloured immigrants to settle in the surrounding areas of the Naparimas. The community’s respect for Jaillet is demonstrated by San Fernando Hill being, at the time, known colloquially as Morne Jaillet. From the community there emerged an ambitious and articulate group, from which came many of the leading professional and intellectual personalities of nineteenth Century Trinidad.

Trinidad became British in 1797 when the Spanish Governor, Don Jose Maria Chacon, surrendered to the British naval force under Sir Ralph Abercromby. Under the new British administration, the Naparimas remained socially independent and were treated with a great deal of suspicion and prejudice by the British Governors, in particular Governor Sir Ralph Woodford. After a meeting between Lord Bathhurst and Jean Baptiste Philippe in 1829, when he presented his Treatise, A Free Mulatto, the coloured community achieved equal rights.

When he was thirteen, Cazabon was sent to England to attend St. Edmund’s College in Ware. It is interesting that despite their French background, his parents preferred to send him to an English school, perhaps to prepare him for life in an English colony. Later he went to Paris to study art and where he was a student of the marine painter, Jean-Antoine Theodore Gudin (1802-1880), the portraitist Michel-Martin Drolling (1789-1851), Antoine Leon Morel-Fatio (1810-1871) and, it is believed, Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). It is likely that Cazabon learnt his printing techniques from Morel-Fatio. Cazabon exhibited at the Salon du Louvre in 1839 and every year from 1843 to 1847. He travelled extensively in France and painted in Italy. His school was that of the French Landscape, his work showing a close affinity to that of another pupil of Delaroche, Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817-1878).

Cazabon returned to Trinidad in 1848 and in 1851 produced a series of eighteen lithographs, Views of Trinidad. In 1857 he published a second series, Album of Trinidad, and in 1860 contributed to two other series, Views of Demerara and Album Martiniquaise. Cazabon’s œuvre is extensive; his work shows a wide knowledge of media – oils, watercolours, gouache, gesso, etc. Although he was primarily a watercolourist and landscape artist, both his formal and informal portraits are highly valued, and his illustrations for the newspapers of the day, of important historic significance. His sketches for the Illustrated London News give us an insight into life in Trinidad, showing the riots of 1845, the trial of the rioters, the great fire of Port of Spain of 1850 and, on a more social side, “Ball on board Her Majesty’s Ship Wellesley” in Port of Spain.

In 1860, Cazabon moved to Martinique, where he lived and worked in Saint Pierre, but his success was limited and he returned to Trinidad about 1870. He taught art privately and at both Queen’s Royal College and St. Mary’s College and continued to paint from his studio on Edward Street, Port of Spain, for a diminishing clientele. He died in virtual poverty on 20th November 1888. He was buried in the Lapeyrouse Cemetery. In 2010 his grave was restored by the conservation group, Citizens for Conservation.

In Trinidad, Cazabon’s most important patron was Lord Harris, the English Governor from 1848 to 1854. The Harris Collection of 44 paintings, now displayed at the family home at Belmont in Kent, England, is perhaps the most important collection of nineteenth Century visual references of Trinidad. Several other less extensive, but important collections were commissioned by William Burnley, the Scottish-American planter, John Lamont and the Earl of Dundonald among them.

Script by Geoffrey MacLean

Brand

Cazabon, Michel-Jean (1813–1888)

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 splendour. 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. Michel-Jean 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 coloured" 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 lifestyle and only later in life did he find it necessary to earn a living from his paintings. He followed the familiar pattern for students at that time, travelling extensively in France and Italy painting the landscape. His work was shown at the Salon du Louvre in 1839 and every year from 1843 to 1847. His philosophy and style follow closely that of the contemporary French landscape artists. In 1843 he married a French woman, Rosalie Trolard. His first daughter was born in Paris in 1844, followed by the birth of his only son. In 1845 he visited Trinidad, returning to Paris in 1851 to publish a series of eighteen lithographs, "Views of Trinidad, 1851". After the birth of his second daughter in Paris in 1852, he returned with his family to Trinidad. Cazabon soon became popular as a society painter, not only with his paintings of Trinidad scenery, but also with his portraits of the planters and merchants of Port of Spain and their families. He taught art and provided illustrations of local events for English newspapers. In Trinidad, Cazabon's most important patron was Lord Harris, the English Governor from 1848 to 1854, recording many of his social functions and excursions. The Harris Collection of 44 paintings, now displayed at the family home at Belmont in Kent, England, is perhaps the most important collection of nineteenth century visual references of Trinidad. Several other less extensive, but important collections were commissioned by William Burnley, the Scottish-American planter, John Lamont and the Earl of Dundonald. In 1857 he published a second series of eighteen lithographs of local scenes, Album of Trinidad. In 1860 he published, with the photographer Hartmann, a series of sixteen lithographs entitled Album of Demerara, and in that same year contributed one of the scenes in Album Martiniquais, published by Hartmann and the lithographer, Eugène Cicéri. In 1862, Cazabon moved with his family to Saint Pierre in Martinique. He hoped that Saint Pierre, described then as the Paris of the New World, would offer a metropolitan spirit that Trinidad lacked, and provide a greater appreciation for his art. Finding much the same attitudes prevailing, he returned to Trinidad about 1870 and attempted to pick up the threads of his former life. Never to regain his social standing, he began to drink to dull his disillusionment. Hawking his paintings around Port of Spain, he became known only as a drunken, though gentle, old eccentric. In 1888, while working at his easel, he died of a heart attack, and the following day was unceremoniously buried in Lapeyrouse Cemetery.

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