(b Portland, 25 Jan 1931; d St Catherine, 15 June 1980). Jamaican painter. In 1953 he left Jamaica to study advertising design at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. In 1955, however, he moved to the Los Angeles County Art Institute, where he studied painting and graphic art for five years; he returned to Jamaica in the early 1960s and continued to work in advertising while painting and exhibiting regularly. In the 1960s and 1970s, along with Karl Parboosingh, he became a major force in the development of abstract art in Jamaica, and in 1970 he established in Kingston the John Peartree Gallery, which for ten years was to be the principal venue for exhibitions of abstract and modernist art in Jamaica. Hyde’s own art ranged from an Expressionism influenced by the American painter Rice Lebrun (b 1900) in California in the late 1950s, to a more abstract vision developed in Jamaica in the 1960s and 1970s, where the Abstract Expressionist style of New York provided the technical basis for extended series devoted principally to dance, the female nude and Jamaican flora. After 1975 his figurative Expressionism resurfaced, but with added psychological dimensions inspired by artists such as Francis Bacon. He began to depict the social outcasts, the homeless and the deranged who roamed the streets of Kingston, whom he called the ‘casualties’. For Hyde, this would be the fate of all Jamaicans if the march towards Communism in Jamaica was not halted. In painting after painting he denounced his country’s government.

• Hyde, Eugene
  • Jamaica, §IV: Painting, graphic arts and sculpture
  • Watson, Barrington