Instructor to many of the great native artists of the era, Desangles is remembered as one of the forerunners of Dominican national art and initiators of the country's costumbrismo style.

[1][2] In 1893, dictator Ulises Hereaux deemed Desangles a conspirator and exiled him from the country after his students painted public works of the leader hanged.

[1] Some of the most recognizable names that studied under Desangles include Abelardo Rodríguez Urdaneta, Ramón Frade, Arturo Grullón, Leopoldo Navarro, Adolfo García Obregón, Manuel María Sanabia, Arquímedes de la Concha, Carlos Ramírez Guerra, and Francisco González Lamarche.

[1][4] In 1912, he was appointed director of the Municipal Academy of Fine Arts in San Cristóbal and in 1935 he became Head of the Provincial School of Painting in Santiago de Cuba.

[5] Luis Desangles was born on 8 February 1861 in Santo Domingo to Juan Pedro Desangles, a native of the Pyrenees region in France living in the country since the 1830s and Teresa Sibilly, who was born in Curaçao to French parents, with whom he had four children: Epifanio (1858), Luis (1861), Pedro Nicolás (1863) and María Ana (1865).

[7] In short time, Desangles’s workshop became a cultural epicenter of the city where intellectuals like Eugenio Maria de Hostos, Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal, Américo Lugo, José Rufino Reyes, and Emilio Prud'Homme gathered.

[7] Desangles worked as a teacher of various disciplines: in addition to teaching art, he gave musical instruction as a musician with command of various instruments; he established a gymnasium where he taught exercise classes; and he’s remembered as one of the first collectors of pre-Hispanic objects, colonial antiquities and works of art of his time.

He returned to his native country in 1904, but was there only briefly before being appointed Consul for Santiago de Cuba by President Carlos Morales.

He carries out notable works such as the Mural of the Cathedral of San Salvador, in the Province of Bayamo, and ten paintings of biblical matters, located in the same ecclesiastical enclosure.