Blanchard, Sisson

Sisson Blanchard – was born in 1929 in Trouin, a small village in the mountains of southern Haiti. According to Eleanor Ingalls Christensen in her 1975 book, The Art of Haiti, he came to Port-au-Prince as a young man and got a job as a yard boy in the house of Joel and Ethel Kenter, who owned the Hotel Mon Reve on the Champs de Mars. The Kenters were friends of DeWitt Peters. In 1948, Joel Kenter gave painting materials to Sisson who soon began selling his work to the Centre d’Art, encouraged by DeWitt and by Jason Seley, an American sculptor who taught at the Centre then. Blanchard later moved on to the Galerie Issa.

Blanchard arranges fish, birds, animals, vegetables and flowers in orderly columns or disorderly groups. His paintings are original and bold and after more than 50 years, are feeling more and more uplifting and wonderful, especially for someone who was considered by some to be commercial and formalized.

Sisson Blanchard died in the early 1980’s. His son, Smith Blanchard is also a talented painter.