Selden Rodman spent five decades collecting, dealing and writing about Haitian painting, and left his journals to an archive without cutting the passages that make him look worst. Gonzalez uses them to examine how one American critic came to regard Haiti's art world as his own creation.

Rodman's affection was genuine and his judgements consistent. He prized painters he took to be untutored, comparing them to Breughel and to Byzantine icons, and dismissed the urban, internationally minded artists of the Foyer des Arts Plastiques. Gonzalez observes that those he condemned were generally the ones working outside the Centre d'Art and beyond his reach as a dealer, and that his praise rested on assumptions about black innocence and white sophistication.

The chapter also tracks his accommodation with the Duvalier regime, whose character he understood clearly and criticised only in his private notebooks.