Cletus Henriques

Cletus Henriques (c. 1927 – 1976) was a Guyanese painter and exhibition organizer, regarded as one of Guyana's leading abstract painters. Trained in Brazil, he moved from figurative scenes to expressionist and abstract work, and several of his paintings are in Guyana's National Collection. He designed the Enmore Martyrs Monument and helped mount the art exhibition of the first Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972. He also designed jewelry and the stamps issued across the Caribbean to mark the West Indies' victory at the 1975 Cricket World Cup. He was murdered in 1976, and the case remains unsolved.¹²³⁴⁵

Henriques worked mainly in oil. His early paintings, such as Shave Ice Cart, were figurative, but he later turned to jewel-like shapes and glowing color that critic Rashid Osman likened to the palettes of Latin American painters. Guyanese painter Stanley Greaves links this approach to his years in Brazil. Greaves considers River's Edge (1968), an oil on board painted wet-into-wet in yellows, blues, and greens, one of the finest works of Henriques's expressionist middle period. Masquerade Dancers (1969) reduces its figures to flat, patterned shapes in soft colors. Both are in the National Collection of Art at Castellani House, Guyana's national gallery. Henriques also designed the Enmore Martyrs Monument in Enmore, Guyana, honoring five sugar workers killed by police during a 1948 strike. Their names are engraved on five cutlasses fixed to the monument, which was unveiled in 1977.^15678910

Henriques attended St. Stanislaus College in Georgetown and later spent many years in Brazil. There he received formal art training and worked in an antiquarian workshop that made small icons of Christian saints, while also designing jewelry. Back in Guyana, he worked for the National History and Arts Council, organizing and staging art exhibitions. At Carifesta in 1972, he was listed among the festival's participating artists for Guyana and helped convert Bishops' High School into the gallery for its international art exhibition. Writer Terence Roberts later counted him, with Basil Hinds and Denis Williams, among Guyana's leading organizers and judges of visual art, and recalled that Henriques had served as Williams's assistant on the arts council. In 1976, within weeks of his cricket stamps going on sale in Guyana, Henriques was found murdered in his apartment at Fulton Court in Georgetown. The case was never solved.²³⁴¹¹

Henriques designed the pair of stamps issued in 1976 to celebrate the West Indies' win at the first Cricket World Cup, held in England in 1975. The issue followed a July 1975 decision by the Council of Ministers of the Caribbean Community (Caricom), the regional bloc of Caribbean states, to mark the victory with a region-wide stamp. The lower value shows a map of the Caribbean with stumps and crossed bats, with the issuing countries highlighted in red. The higher value shows the Prudential Cup trophy. Guyana released its pair on August 3, 1976. St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago also issued the two stamps together as miniature sheets.³¹²¹³