The late 1940s saw the first rumblings of appreciation for what is now called “Outsider” art—works created by nonacademically trained artists who operate apart from the cultural mainstream and its art-historical canon. In France, the artist Jean Dubuffet, the Surrealist leader André Breton and the art critic Michel Tapié celebrated visionary autodidacts, whose work they labeled “art brut,” or “raw art.”
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Sketches of the Past
April 2009Born in Jamaica in 1794 into a well-to-do Sephardic-Jewish merchant family, Belisario spent part of his life in England and died in London in 1849. His major work is Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica, a series of lithographs of Jamaican slaves dressed up for a popular music-and-dance celebration, which the artist, who was based in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, issued to subscribers in 1837 and 1838.
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