Luis Desangles

Luis Desangles Lubiles (8 February 1861, Santo Domingo – 13 April 1940, Santiago de Cuba) was a Dominican painter, sculptor, and educator born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Instructor to many of the great native artists of the era, Desangles is remembered as one of the forerunners of Dominican national art and initiators of the country's costumbrismo style.

His artistic subjects range from portraits, pictorial daily life, religious iconography, historical depictions, naturalist landscapes, and still life. Many of his portraits are of influential political figures, such as Juan Pablo Duarte, Buenaventura Báez Méndez, Matías Ramón Mella, Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, Gregorio Luperón, Ulises Francisco Espaillat, and Eugenio María de Hostos. He is also credited for painting many religious paintings and murals in cathedrals throughout Cuba, such as in Santiago de Cuba Cathedral and the Cathedral of San Salvador in Bayamo.

In 1893, dictator Ulises Hereaux deemed Desangles a conspirator and exiled him from the country after his students painted public works of the leader hanged. His travels after exile led him to Puerto Rico, New York City, and Cuba.

In 1912, he was appointed director of the Municipal Academy of Fine Arts in San Cristóbal and in 1935 he became Head of the Provincial School of Painting in Santiago de Cuba.

Early life Luis Desangles was born in Santo Domingo to Juan Pedro Desangles, a native of the Pyrenees region in France living in the country since the 1830s and Teresa Sibilly, a native of Curaçao, with whom he had four children: Epifanio (1858), Luis (1861), Pedro Nicolás (1863) and María Ana (1865). Desangles was born in the same year in which Dominican conservatives annexed the country to Spain. As a child he showed a fondness for painting which his father encouraged, enrolling him in art classes with Leon Cordero, a Spanish painter living in the country, from 1870-1874, until Cordero died in 1874. Those who treated Luis Desangles familiarly called him Sisito.

In 1883 he opened an art workshop in Santo Domingo, Casa-Taller, on Padre Billini street, where he instructed many of the great names that go on to define the early era of art in the country. He returned to his native country in 1904, but was there only briefly before being appointed Consul for Santiago de Cuba by President Carlos Morales.

Cuba Desangles had his most prolific artistic production in Cuba. He carries out notable works such as the Mural of the Cathedral of San Salvador, in the Province of Bayamo, and ten paintings of biblical matters, located in the same ecclesiastical enclosure. The cathedral mural is titled The Oath of the Flag, measuring 850 × 450 cm. It was commissioned in 1918 by the Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, Monsignor Félix Ambrosio Guerra y Guerra, to be placed inside the main parish of Bayamo.

He would live in Cuba for the rest of his life and it became his second homeland. In 1912, he was appointed Director of the "Escuela Superior de Varones de San Cristóbal" (a boys' school) and later taught at the "Academia Municipal de Bellas Artes". In 1935, he was appointed Honorary Director of the "Escuela Provincial de Artes Plásticas de Santiago de Cuba" (now the "Escuela Provincial de Artes Plásticas José Joaquín Tejada").

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