Préfète Duffaut

Préfète Duffaut (1 January 1923 – 6 October 2012) was a Haitian painter. Born in Cyvadier, Sud-Est, near the seaport of Jacmel, where he lived and worked. Duffaut was one of the painters, alongside important Haitian artists such as Gesner Abelard and Rigaud Benoit, at the Centre d'Art in the Haitian capital. In the early 1950s Duffaut was one of several artists invited to paint murals in the interior of the Cathedral of Sainte Trinité (largely destroyed in the January 2010 earthquake) in Port-au-Prince; his works there were titled "The Temptation of Christ" and "The Processional Road" (also referred to as the "Procession of the Crossing Guard"). Duffaut paints in the vernacular style and his oeuvre typically consists of fantastical "imaginary cities" (villes imaginaires), that often contain coastal elements with boats. The cityscapes are strongly influenced by the coastal city of Jacmel. Another recurrent theme, especially in earlier works, is imagery associated with Vodou.