Esteban Chartrand was born in Cuba in 1840. His mature and romantic style, incorporating many of the techniques perfected in Europe since the Renaissance, was probably the result of formal training in Havana.

Chartrand was also in the United States before 1865. Paintings with a Key West, Charleston, Savannah, Baltimore and New York location also suggest that Chartrand probably studied developments in American painting at that time.

Chartrand continued to travel between the United States and Cuba until his death from tuberculosis in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1883.

He is known for his romantic visions of the Cuban countryside and the multi-cultural inhabitants and lifestyles of rural Cuba.

Written and submitted by Gary R. Libby, whose information on this artist is in Libby's book, Cuba: A History in Art, 2015.

A Cuban artist in the Barbizon mood, Esteban Chartrand's landscape art enjoyed considerable success in his native land. Art historian Gary Libby has pointed out that Chartrand's "type of sentimental landscape eulogized the palm tree and the small stream, and was destined to a long and popular life in Cuban art."

Like Joseph Rusling Meeker and the equally elusive George F. Higgins, Chartrand paints in a style which enhances the natural mystery of the tropical landscape, which, unlike its Hudson River School counterpart, never lends itself entirely to a tamed aesthetic of total beauty. That the rough, slightly threatening air of the terrain could be so wonderfully captured is a tribute to both the artist's ability and the dimensions of the setting itself. ECP