Juana Borrero, who only lived to be 18, was a young woman of extraordinary talent who didn’t have time to fully develop her creative potential, not only in the visual arts but also in poetry, where she reached great heights. The daughter of Consuelo Pierra Agüero and Esteban Borrero Echeverría, a prominent doctor, writer, and man of culture, she spent much of her childhood in an emblematic mansion in Puentes Grandes, which hosted famous Havana social gatherings, in which Juana herself participated.

The girl’s interest in painting and her existential concerns arose precisely in this mansion, under the positive influence of her father and the contact it fostered with nature and the cultural environment of the time. Drawing was one of the essential forms of art she cultivated, in an eagerness to reflect everything around her, with the vehemence characteristic of youth but with a quality recognized by many of her contemporaries, including Julián del Casal, with whom she maintained a close relationship. The poet once stated:

“To understand the value of her paintings, it is necessary to contemplate some of them. A short series of lessons received from different masters were enough for her, illuminated by her genius, to launch herself into the conquest of all the secrets of pictorial art. It can be said without hyperbole that she possesses them all.”

Her first painting teacher was Dolores Desvernine, who introduced her to the basics of the technique and awakened her passion for painting. At the age of nine, she began studying at the San Alejandro Academy, where, despite being a woman, she excelled with her exceptional artistic talent. There, she had Luis Mendoza and Antonio Herrera as teachers, and learned a little more about perspective and the use of color, becoming a young exponent of Cuban visual art at the time, a promise sadly cut short by her early death.

Later she also received several classes from Armando García Menocal, who is said to have been surprised by the young woman’s skill in drawing a sketch and considered that he truly had nothing new to teach her, since she already possessed a perfect command of the painting techniques of her time, combined with the imagination and sensitivity of a soul like hers, in step with the beat of her time and her world, which was Cuba above all things.

In the 1890s, she traveled twice to Washington with her father. During her first stay, she received painting lessons from Professor McDonald for six months, completing her academic training. After the outbreak of the war in 1895, her family emigrated, first to Central America and later to Key West, where Juana became seriously ill and died before her 19th birthday. Most of the paintings belong to relatives of the young woman, one of the most talented young artists of the fine arts and literature that the island had at the turn of the century.