José Joaquín Tejada y Mata, born in Santiago de Cuba, 1867 died March 3 1943. His precocious liking for painting drove him to copy lithographies by his grandfather, Joaquín de Mata y Tejada, one of the pioneers of Cuban engraving. Still very young he obtained a scholarship from the Santiago de Cuba City Hall and travelled first to Spain and then to Italy, France and Holland. He visited the United States, exhibited his paintings in New York and obtained very favorable comments to his work, including the famous and beautiful article written by José Martí. The events of our Independence War took him to Mexico, where he lived three years. His paintings from this period show the influence of the peculiar color of Aztec lands. After his return to the fatherland he settled in Santiago. He was a professor and director of the Municipal Academy of Fine Arts, president of the Artistic Association of Oriente, member of the Academy of Arts and Literature and president, organizer and main figure of the First Art Congress. The landscape of the country’s eastern region is the best achieved sector of his varied and prolific production, which shows the influence of the landscape artists of the Barbizon School (France) in the way he handles the environment and his trend to poeticize the landscape. His most disseminated work was La lista de lotería, also known as La Confronta, whose original is in exhibition at the Emilio Bacardi Museum in Santiago de Cuba.