Painter Wilson Bigaud dies ten weeks after the quake took his murals

Wilson Bigaud died at Vialet, near Petit-Goâve, on 22 March 2010. He was born in Port-au-Prince on 29 January 1931, and at fifteen Hector Hyppolite walked him into DeWitt Peters’s Centre d’Art. At nineteen his painting Paradise took second prize at an international exhibition in Washington. In 1951 he joined Philomé Obin, Castera Bazile, Préfète Duffaut, Rigaud Benoit and Toussaint Auguste in painting the murals of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince; his panel was the Marriage at Cana. The earthquake of 12 January 2010 brought the cathedral down and destroyed most of those walls. He outlived his masterpiece by ten weeks.