Héctor Hyppolite

Hector Hyppolite was born in 1894 in Saint-Marc, a coastal town in Haiti, into a working-class family. He was a third-generation Vodou priest, or houngan, and made his living as a decorator and house painter, with no formal training in art. His spiritual life, rather than the art schools, shaped what he later painted.

In 1945 the Haitian novelist Philippe Thoby-Marcelin came across the doors of a bar in the village of Montrouis, decorated with birds and flowers painted with home-made brushes of cock's feathers, and sought out the man who had painted them. Hyppolite was brought to Port-au-Prince, where he joined the Centre d'Art, opened in 1944 by the American watercolourist DeWitt Peters, which gave Haitian artists free materials.

At the Centre d'Art he began to paint Vodou ceremonies and spirits in bold colours with an unmistakable visionary quality. The flowers he had painted on doors could stand for the attributes of deities in Vodou symbolism, and, recognising how interested art buyers were in Vodou, he put it at the centre of his work. In just under four years, according to various counts, he made between 250 and 600 paintings.

In 1945 and 1946 the Surrealist poet André Breton travelled to Haiti with the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. Lam bought two of Hyppolite's paintings and Breton five, and Breton wrote about his work in Surrealism and Painting. Although Breton included him among the Surrealists, Hyppolite's art was more religious than dreamlike, but Breton's admiration brought Haitian painting to a world audience. After meeting him, Breton wrote in the Centre d'Art's guestbook that Haitian painting would drink the blood of the phoenix.

In January 1947 Hyppolite showed his work at a UNESCO exhibition in Paris, where it was enthusiastically received. He died in Port-au-Prince in 1948, at the height of his fame, aged about 54. He is known as the father-figure and Grand Master of Haitian art, and his legacy inspired a whole school of Haitian painters, among them Wilson Bigaud.