HENRY CLEENEWERCK (1818-1901) View of Santiago de Cuba Oil on canvas Signed lower right, located (Cuba) and dated 1868. 68 x 104 cm Provenance : Former Thomas Alexander Brooks collection. From 1850, Cleenewerck, a painter of Belgian origin, lived in the United States. Around 1860, he was in Savannah, Georgia, where the local newspaper "Les Nouvelles Quotidiennes du Matin" devoted an article to him. In 1865 he was in Cuba, in the province of Mantazas, where he painted the jungle and the banks of the river Canimar. In 1868, when revolutionary unrest broke out, he returned to the United States. He then returned to Europe where he took part in the Paris Salon in 1869, then the Brussels Salon in 1872 with a view of the surroundings of Munich. He lived at Gabelsberger strasse 27. At the Brussels Salon in 1878 he exhibited "Soirée à Cannes" and "Matin à Antibes". He noted as resident in Poperinge in Belgium near the French border. In 1879, he returned to America and lived in San Francisco for three years in a flat on the corner of Stockton Street and Bush Street. He became close friends with the painter William Keith (1838-1911). In 1882 he took part in the National Academy exhibition in New York with a painting entitled "The Yosemite Trail". A year later, he returned to Belgium and organised the sale of his studio on 1st March 1883 in a room of the Association of Art in San Francisco. A total of 246 lots were sold. At the 1893 Salon, he exhibited more views of America, "Yosemite Valley" and "Paper Mill Creek". After his death in 1901, his widow, who outlived him by a few months, donated a number of paintings to the town of Poperinge. They were exhibited in a retrospective in 1995.