MADRID, Spain.- Adriana Bellini, the first woman to graduate from the Saint Alexander Academy, She was born in the Dominican Republic, but she lived in Cuba from a very young age, as her father, who was a diplomat, photographer and painter, was appointed consul on the island, where he settled with the family.
Born in 1865, in the eighties she enrolled in what would later become the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1818 in the Convent of San Agustín, in Old Havana, as a Free School of Drawing and Painting, one of the most of Latin America to teach Visual Arts, and that with the passage of time would settle in other areas of the capital.
They would name it San Alejandro from 1832 in memory of its creator Don Alejandro Ramírez, general superintendent and director of the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country, who supported the founding of the educational artistic center, whose first director was the French painter, architect and decorator Juan Bautista Vermay (1784-1833).
Later, other foreign painters took over the leadership until, in 1878, the Cuban Miguel Melero Rodríguez (1836-1907) won the position by opposition, and extended teaching to the female sex, thereby taking more than a decade ahead of the French Academy. In the 1879-1880 academic year, decades after the establishment of the institution, the first female students entered, which facilitated the entry of Adriana Bellini, who excelled in painting.
In 1899 Bellini created his own Academy of Drawing and Painting, for which he devised an instructional method that obtained good results and was generalized towards other teachings such as the Normal Summer School. In 1901, the US government intervener invited her to be part of the group of teachers who visited Harvard University, where she gave lessons on her technique. In 1906 she was approved as a professor of Elementary Drawing at the San Alejandro Academy, thus becoming the first woman to occupy a teaching position in that faculty. She is a founding member of the Cuban Fine Arts Club and a member of its Board of Directors, she occasionally wrote for the press on artistic topics.
Among his most outstanding works are “El Mambí” and “Cuban Cook”; the latter exhibited in the SAt the Turn of the Century wing of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba, presents a subject of still life, a composition with figures in the foreground of which the author offers a variety of vegetables and fish prepared by a mestiza, the cook.
He obtained medals in several international exhibitions such as the Silver one in San Luis, United States (1902), and in the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville, Spain (1929), where he received an Honorary Medal for his painting “El Mambí”. Adriana Bellini she died in Havana in January 1946.
