To Preserve Their Freedom: Jacob Lawrence's Toussaint L'Ouverture Serigraph Series

At 21, Jacob Lawrence rose to fame with his Toussaint L'Ouverture series, later reworked as 15 bold serigraphs.

In 1938, Jacob Lawrence was a twenty-one-year old graduate of the American Artist School in New York. Like many of his contemporaries, Lawrence’s work was funded in part by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Lawrence, however, did not rely on this source of support for long. That year, he completed his first major series. Named for the legendary Haitian leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, who helped to emancipate Haiti from Spanish and French rule, the series catapulted Lawrence into the national spotlight. He later reimagined his original forty-one panels as fifteen dynamic serigraphs, which illustrate his ingenious use of color, angled lines, stark figures, and his command of composition.