The history of Cuba prior to the victory of the Revolution was determined in large measure by several centuries of Spanish colonial rule and several decades of North-American neo-colonial exploitation, something that cannot possibly be ignored in any analysis of this or that aspect of Cuba’s historical development.

There was a period when art served solely as a vehicle for religious or political propaganda. The period that came after was marked by a divorce from reality through the use of obsolete, academic forms of expression. This was the case in the colonial epoch. In the 1920s the moribund foundations on which the so-called republic rested were severely battered by the hurricane winds of the times. It was for Cuba a tempestuous decade, a decade filled with events that have gone down in the history of the country. It saw the emergence, in 1927, of a group of artists who called themselves the “avant-garde”. These artists forged their weapons in European movements to use them on Cuban soil. Their aim, which each perceived in his own individual way, was to implant the truly Cuban, the truly national into their country’s art without, however, serving its links with the rest of the world: the avant-gardists dedicated themselves to embodying in art the theme of the liberation of their native land.

We know very little about Cuban painting prior to the eighteenth century. All we know is that a certain Spanish monk drew up a list of works by Flemish masters; here and there the records mention the artist Juan Camargo, the icon painter Juan de Salas y Arguello who worked for the nunnery of the order of St Clara around 1646, and Thomas de Manrique who lived in the eighteenth century. Active in that same period were Felipe de Fuentes from Camaguey and Tadeo Chirinos from Santiago de Cuba, and after them Nicolas de la Escalera who is considered the author of the earliest surviving example of Cuban painting.

The well-known names of artists of that period are: Vicente Escobar, Juan del Rio, Miguel Melero.

Among those who contributed to the development of nineteenth-century Cuban landscape painting are two foreign artists – the Frenchman Eduardo Laplante, known mainly for his lithographs of the sugar-mills and towns of Cuba, and the Belgian Henry Cleenwerck, who lived for a time in Havana and Matanzas.

1) Eduardo Laplante "View of Trinidad                                       2) Eduardo Laplante "View of Trinidad

from Mount Vigia", (detail) 1852                                                      from Mount Vigia", (detail), 1852 

3) Henry Gleenewerck                                                                          4) Henry Gleenewerck

"The Yumuri Valley at Dawn", (detail), 1865                                       "The Yumuri Valley at Dawn", (detail), 1865