Le Center d'Art, a building donated to Peters by the Haitian government and still in existence today was opened in 1944 by Peters after he resigned from his teaching position. He intended the center to serve as a combination art school and art gallery; where Haitians could receive academic instruction in both drawing and oil techniques. Surprisingly, the founders of the Art Center discovered a wealth of talent that would affect the history of the art movement in Haiti.

In search of local art, Hector Hyppolite, was one of the first painters to be discovered by Peters. Realizing the potential in local primitive art, he started to seek out other local talents. Artists from the most varied and unlikely backgrounds started to emerge. Philome Obin; a clerk, Peter's house boy, Castera Bazile; a taxi driver, Rigaud Benoit; the Art Center's yard boy, Sisson Blanchard; a bookkeeper, Toussaint Auguste; Petion Savain, Wilson Bigaud, Robert Saint-Brice; a factory worker named Jasmin Joseph, and others.

These men known as the first generation of artist were self-taught, and were hungry and motivated enough to pursue the dream of becoming an artist. Their paintings were full of passion and imagination. They were able to translate their environment, religious observances on canvas and cardboard.

These men were completely artistically untrained. They came to their canvasses as bookkeepers, truck drivers, and houseboys. Their subjects were most often what they perceived in their everyday mundane existence and what they learned from their mythical religion, Although they came from simple backgrounds, their paintings were full of passion and color. They managed to integrate what they saw, felt and believed and express it with intensity of emotion and a childlike innocence.

These men had no formal education, no visual training and basically developed their styles in isolation from the rest of the art world.

Today Haiti is well represented by self-taught and trained artists and the visual arts are flourishing like nowhere else in the Caribbean. The founding of the Centre d'Art in 1944 with DeWitt Peters and its directors has played a major role in the Haitian Renaissance.

The Begining

While most books on Haitian Arts conveniently begin their history of Haitian Art with the Centre D'Art in 1944, there is however clear evidence of artistic activity dating back to the Pre-Columbian era. The Tainos would make dolls, drawings, signs that represented their deities. Archeologists also found sculptures and pots of many kinds that were wonderfully crafted. All this indicates a vibrant artistic life existing as part of everyday life among the Taino.

There exists a record of a former slave called Luc, from Leogane, who, during french colonial times earned a reputation as a painter. In the days after Independence, both Henri Christophe and Alexandre Pétion were patrons of the arts.They regularly entertained European artists, and also founded some art schools at the time. In Christophe's court, foreign and local artists alike found ample commission work. The main themes were to the glory of the Revolution or the Royal family itself. One of those artists was Numa Desroches (1802-1880) who produced one of the most intriguing paintings of that period. It is a view of Palais Sans Souci with a spatial distribution that reminds one of the naïve paintings of the 20th Century. In the 1840s, the Emperor Soulouque founded an Imperial Academy of the Arts.

Further evidence of artistic activity comes from a photograph dated from c. 1900 that shows a shack adorned with religious paintings. Again the style of the paintings is close to the Primitive Art ("Art naïf") that would become popular from the 1940s. Both paintings show that style of painting is a long tradition in Haiti instead of being the result of the work of any Art School.

In the early 20th Century a giant emerges from the northern town of Cap-Haitien. He was Philomé Obin (b 1892-?) arguably among the top 5 Haitain painters ever. Obin was a self-taught painter whose main themes were scenes of every day life in Cap-Haitien and historic scenes of the Haitian Revolution. In many ways, his work is representative of the spirit of the 20s and 30s when the global negritude movement would see a local manifestation in Haiti with the Indigenist movement.