Philomé Obin

Pilgrims going out for the feast of St. Anne on Horseback

1958

Philomé Obin was born in Cap-Haitian, Haiti, in 1891 and died in 1986. He was a descriptive self-taught painter, and the charm of his art lies in the subtle distortion that comes with the failure of his technique to follow the rules. He joined the Centre d’Art in its opening years, 1944, and his fame, though very late, did not change his way of living or style. Obin is the father of the Cap-Haitian school, a distinctive style of painting that emphasizes daily life, street, and historical scenes reflecting Haiti’s colonial past. Philomé Obin painted two of the murals in the well-visited Episcopal Cathedral in Port-au-Prince, which was unfortunately destroyed during the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010. His paintings belong mainly to the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, IOWA, the finest Collection of Haitian Art in the UNITED STATES. Mrs. Jacqueline Onassis made a special trip to Cap -Haitian to see his art, and his paintings have been sold in major auction sales houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, everywhere in New York. Philomé Obin’s art, next to Hector Hyppolite’s art, is considered as one of the oldest and founding fathers of Haitian painting. He is a star in every important Haitian collection. His art is mentioned in all the leading Haitian Art books. “Obin’s concern with precision and the respect of reality injects a measure of coldness into his narrative works” (Gérald Alexis in his book, Peintres Haitiens)