Tiburcio Lorenzo
Period: Early Republic
1912 - 1995

House in the Country
Casa de Campo, 1984
oil on canvas
22 1/2 x 31 inches

Tiburcio Lorenzo Sanchez (1912- 1996) was born on April 14, 1912, in Las Taironas, Pinar del Río, Cuba. In 1936, he won, out of seventy contestants, one of the three scholarships assigned to his province to study at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts. There, he was a pupil of the outstanding landscape painters Domingo Ramos and Leopoldo Romañach. He graduated from San Alejandro in 1944. In Havana he became a close friend of Victor Manuel and Fidelio Ponce.


Soon after his graduation, he participated in the exhibit Arte Pictórico (Pictorial Art), in the Social Center of the Spanish Colony of Pinar del Río, in 1944, where he presented landscape paintings of “exceptional virtues”, according to the art critics. One year later he finished Monumento a las Madres (Monument to Mothers), a sculpture that was placed, in 1945, at the Parque de la Independencia de Pinar del Río (Independence Park of Pinar del Río).


Tiburcio Lorenzo fought to arouse interest in painting and to promote its development in the Pinar del Río region. Along with other province fellows, he made important efforts to create the Provincial School of Fine Arts, a dream which came true in 1946. The artist then taught there for twenty years. His work was shown in the XXXI Fine Arts Salon in Havana in 1949, and in subsequent exhibits by this entity. In 1954, he exhibited the artwork Flamboyan at the Segunda Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte (Second Hispanic American Biennial of Art) in Havana. The following year, he was presented at the Sociedad Liceo de Pinar del Río (Lyceum Society of Pinar del Rio), in the Primer Salon Nacional de Artes Plasticas (First National Salon of Fine Arts). Additionally, he stood out at the collective selection of Cuban painters that was sent to Tampa, Florida, on the occassion of the commemoration of the centennial of that city's foundation. The El Prado Gallery, in Havana, served as his agent from its inception and exhibited him again in 1959. On his participation in the aforementioned selection presented in Tampa, the art critic Adela Jaume expressed that his artworks “represent a tribute to the magnificent nature of the homeland, with its flawless blue sky, bright greens and magic spell, that breathes and becomes transcendent…” He continued with his work until 1991 and passed away in Cuba on August 13, 1996.