Sisson Blanchard (1929 - 1981)

Sisson Blanchard was born in 1929 in the southern Haitian village of Trouin, a small village in the mountains of southern Haiti. He came to Port-au-Prince as a young man and got a job as a yardboy in the house of Joel and Ethel Kenter (friends of DeWitt Peters), who owned the Hotel Mon Reve on the Champs de Mars. He began painting in 1948, with the encouragement of the American sculptor Jason Seley and DeWitt Peters. Blanchard's paintings were first shown at the Centre d'Art, and have since been exhibited all over the world. His son, Smith Blanchard also became a prominent Haitian painter.