Lot 175: Paisaje con malangas

Valentin Sanz Carta (Cuban 1849-1898) Paisaje con malangas signed 'V. Sanz Carta' (lower left) oil on canvas 40¼ x 30 in. (102 x 76 cm.) Painted circa 1882.

Private collection, Madrid.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

This work is sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by Dra. Olga López Nuñez, dated 26 March 2007.


By the time landscape artist Valentín Sanz Carta (1849-1898) arrived in Cuba in 1872 from his place of birth in the Canary Islands (part of Spain), he was an accomplished and well-known painter. As an artist he is best known for his realist landscape paintings and as a teacher, for shaping a whole generation of artists. Among his most celebrated students were Antonio Rodríguez Morey--one of Cuba's landscape masters of the nineteenth-century and, Aurelio Melero. (1)

In 1886 when the artist joins the San Alejandro Academy as an instructor, a course in landscape painting is newly established. The artist almost immediately embarks on changing the stifling and limiting curriculum of the institution and encourages his students to create landscapes a plein air taking them frequently on excursions to places within Havana such as the Botanic Gardens and other areas of the thriving city where they could experience nature and capture its essence.

(1) Dr. J. Guanche Pérez.