Early Morning in Cuba

Henry Cleenewerck's naturalistic landscape art was the product of a global career, during which he witnessed many of the political upheavals that reshaped the nations of the western world. He was born in the village of Watou, Belgium, within walking distance of the border with France, to French parents. He studied art in nearby Poperinge and in the ancient town of Ieper (previously known as Ypres). In the mid-1850s he traveled to the United States and by 1860 worked in Savannah, Georgia, where he exhibited Bonaventure Cemetery (c.1860; Telfair Museum, Savannah) at Armory Hall that May, and in November was on hand when news of Abraham Lincoln's election sparked a demonstration for Secession from the Union. His sketch of the scene was lithographed by R.M. Howell with the title The First Flag of Independence Raised in the South by the Citizens of Savannah Georgia, Nov. 8th 1860 (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress). Within six months, the Civil War had broken out and Cleenewerck must have departed the city. The next we hear of him is in the mid-1860s in Havana, Cuba, where he was commissioned to paint landscapes for many of the distinguished families who had become wealthy from sugar plantations. Jose María Ximeno in 1865 had in his private collection several scenes of the sugar-rich Matanzas province, including the Yumuri Valley, Canimar River, and San Antonio de los Baños. Again, however, the artist had the bad luck to be present at a moment of political upheaval and about 1868, when Revolution broke out, he moved to Paris (Cernuda Arte, Coral Gables, Forida). Established in his Parisian studio, he reminisced about his recent Cuban sojourn and produced pictures such as this Early Morning in Cuba, where his direct observation of nature on the island was filtered through nostalgia and memory. The canvas bears the date 1870, when serene pictures of New World nature provided a beneficial antidote to events in France, including a war with Prussia and the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871. He remained in the French capital, often painting Cuban scenes, until at least 1873.

Early Morning in Cuba demonstrates the artist's considerable skill. He painted the scene on a nearly square canvas, an especially challenging format, in which the dense vegetation and choking vines are relieved with a glimpse of sky above and reflection in the water below. He had a particular fondness for including wildlife and especially deer in his forest interiors. Here two deer stand in the stream feeding on vegetation with a third, further distant, barely visible in the tree screen. The image presents a tropical idyll, undisturbed by the presence of man.

Spending his early years on the flat, gray Belgian coast made Cleenewerck hunger for new and exotic scenery, just as it later drove Symbolist painter James Ensor, living in nearby Ostend, to conjure strange forms and colors. By 1880 Cleenewerck was again in the United States, this time in California, where he painted the splendors of Yosemite Valley. A handful of his western landscapes have been located including South Wall, Yosemite and Indian Encampment, Yosemite but it is likely that more await rediscovery. Cleenewerck also participated in the life of the nascent San Francisco art scene, where he served as a judge for the annual exhibition of the California School of Design and showed his work locally (E. M. Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940. 3rd. ed., Crocker Art Museum, 2002, 1:221). Similarly, in Cuba his art was shown in the most important exposition held there in the 19th century, the International Exposition of Matanzas of 1881. At the end of his life he returned home to Belgium, where he died in Brussels in 1901. His descendant Marguerite Yourcenar (born Cleenewerck de Crayencour), the first female member of the Académie Française, wrote about their family (L. Cleenewerck, "Biographical Overview of the Cleenewerck Family", Accessed 2/19/2024 www.euclid.int/library/cleenewerck). His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Cuba.

Katherine E. Manthorne, Professor of Modern Art of the Americas, The Graduate Center, CUNY.