Hubert Moshett, who celebrated his 100th birthday recently, is Guyana's last living link to the art of the past, and he is also one of the artists whose work helped to create a transition from that art to the one which exists today. Moshett was born in September 1901, and enjoyed an art career which lasted until the mid 1980's. In this period, his work formed part of the transition from the heavily European-influenced art of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Guyana to the developments of a local style in the 1950's. His original influence as a young person came from

his father, but he also worked as a sign painter in his early years and had a long career as a graphic artist.

Moshett came to maturity in colonial Guyana. Artistically, the early decades of the twentieth century were a watershed period in Guyana art, since they lead to one of the most significant and fertile periods in local art history which produced such enduring names as Stanley Greaves, Ron Savory, Aubrey Williams, Marjorie Broodhagen.

Some idea of the status of art at that time is given in a letter from around 1930 written by Golde White, an artist who lived and worked in Guyana and also Barbados. White begins her letter - which was about organising a local art exhibition - by noting that "There has been no Art Exhibition for sometime in this colony, and very little is done to encourage artistic talent" (see 60 years of Women Artists in Guyana, Guyana Women Artists Association, April 1988 for full letter). Yet, there were many locally - born people and expatriates who were producing art. Moshett participated in the exhibition organised by White, and in other exhibitions after that. The names of some of his contemporaries who also later achieved national recognition as artists shows the wealth of talent at that time: Vivian Antrobus, Reginald Phang, E R Burrowes, R G Sharples, Basil Hinds. There were also a number of women who were active, but who have not gained the same level of recognition: Golde White, Mary Heron-Bruce, Dorothy King.

It was this generation of artists who produced the groundswell of Guyanese art. White's exhibition stimulated the mounting of many others. a number of art groups - beginning with the British Guiana Arts and Crafts Society of 1931 - were formed, and art classes were established.

While E R Burrowes is the most famous of the art teachers of this period, Moshett himself ran art classes. All of this happened in what in retrospect must have been a very active and exciting 20 years, from White's 1931 exhibition to the early 1950's with the emergence of Greaves, Williams, Savory and the others. Notably, too, this development was an urban phenomenon.

Not much of the art produced in Guyana from the early period (pre- 1930) has survived. However, some indication of the kind of work produced is given by an anonymous piece which was acquired by Castellani House in 2000. Dubbed Sea Wall Promenade, the painting was probably done in the 1920's, and most likely by a tourist or an expatriate. It shows all the virtues of traditional European landscape painting - the piles of creamy massed clouds, unnamed colour, glazed application of paint, dramatic balance of light and shade, scene straight out of English or Dutch painting.

The work of Moshett and the others was influenced by this kind of art, but also by other contemporary European styles and approaches. In their work could be seen both the traditional influences and the movement away from them, and also something else which comes from knowledge of and inhabitation in the landscape which they painted.

But they all - Moshett, Phang, Antrobus and others - were basically the inheritors of European realist art. Their subjects were the same: the landscape, things of nature, the human figure.

Moshett's portrait of E R Burrowes at his easel is a very revealing spy-hole into the Guyanese artist of that time. Burrowes is recognised as one of the foremost pioneers of local art, but his portrait depicts him as a gentleman painter in the best manner, complete with his tie, white coat and pipe, confronting his canvas in a classical stance. Moshett's technique shows that he had mastered texture and light and composition. But the work has neither the look nor feel of something transplanted from Europe or any other culture. The light is clear tropical light, the brushwork is open, the colours are stronger and more direct. The lessons of Europe had been accepted, successfully assimilated and subtly transformed. It would be the next generation of artists who would take up from here and produce a more radical art.

It is perhaps instructive to make two quick comparisons at this point. Both Stanley Greaves and Moshett were exposed to sign painting - which would have been seen as vernacular rather than high art - in their early years. Yet there is no sign of influence from this in Moshett's paintings, while Greaves used elements from it successfully in his work. Second, while Moshett was a realist artist, this did not prevent him from seeing the value of Amerindian motifs, which he and Phang used in their 1946 Legend of Kaieteur illustrations. But it would take Aubrey Williams to fully tap into these motifs as powerful means of expression.

It was Moshett and his contemporaries who helped create these radical departures by bringing to local art a sense of lived experience, rather than one of experience being dominated by, or transformed into, a style or tradition.

Moshett was an integral part of the local ferment in art. He was a member of the British Guiana Arts and Crafts Society formed in 1931, was secretary to the Guianese Art Group founded in 1944, and was also secretary of the Guyana Art Association of 1966. He also ran art classes. Even after his retirement as an active artist, he remained a noted figure among artists. Notably, however, he never produced a one-man show, although he exhibited with other artists. This might be because he never kept hold of much of his work - most of the estimated 170 pieces which he produced were sold, often for modest prices.

Apart from his activity as an art teacher, a painter in oils, gouache, water-colour, and an artist in pen and ink, the other major current in Moshett's life is his 20 year employment (1941-62) with the British Guiana Lithographic Company (later the Guyana National Printers Limited) and his association with Reginald Phang. These two produced two notable commissions: the Banks DIH Industries of British Guiana series done in 1949, and the illustrations which they did for A J Seymour's Legend of Kaieteur in 1946.

The former series, while a commission, continued Moshett's interest in local life. Done in gouache, the painting capture diverse local activities such as balata bleeding, rice harvesting, sawmilling, cabinet making, etc. Moshett's private work also evidences his interest in the ordinary life of local people. In an exhibition in 1996 held by Castellani House in celebration of his 95th birthday, pictures depicting a sugar estate, catching shrimps, a bus terminus, a market scene, among others, were displayed.

This is the art of personal experience, and Moshett found a way to paint it so that it remained available to local people, ennobled yet familiar. This is the bridge his art created between two cultures. This is also the reason why his work was so precious to the buyers who snapped them up. To us today, they give a clear, unsentimental and assured view of aspects of life in early Guyana.

Moshett's work shows a focus on the actualities of place, a delight in the exploration of light, colour, form and painting technique. Perhaps his influence is seen in the water colours of the father and son Basil and Angold Thompson. In the works of these artists is seen the same focus on ordinary life, and how that life is magically transformed into something which one realises is ordinary yet noble through the artist's touch.

Moshett and his generation of artists gave Guyanese a sense of the validity and beauty of our world, at a time when many Guyanese might not have fully realised that theirs was a genuine and unique life worthy of art.