The following winter, in 1924, he was back at it, creating another bust of Lincoln alongside one of Woodrow Wilson, who died on Feb. 3, 1924. In Orono, fans of University of Maine athletics had Henneman create a sculpture of Bananas T. Bear on campus. This was in the era when UMaine actually had a live bear mascot in captivity on campus, so Henneman had a live model to work from.

Though the public record of Henneman’s snow-sculpting ends in 1924, his life as an artist began far earlier, in his home country of Belgium. Much of his personal history was pieced together by two residents of his home town Oostkamp, Katrien Steelandt and Patrick Vanden Berghe, who came to Bangor in 2015 to research Henneman’s life in Maine.

Born in 1861 in Oostkamp, Henneman made his living as a portrait painter for more than four decades, with many of his paintings still hanging in castles in Belgium, as well as in Oostkamp’s city hall. In 1906, Henneman emigrated to the U.S., initially landing in St. Louis, Missouri. Little is known of his first decade in the state, but it is known that he was commissioned by Bishop Jean-Baptiste Brondel, first Catholic bishop in Montana and a fellow Belgian, to paint an altarpiece for the cathedral in Helena.

Eventually, Henneman became associated with artist Asa Grant Randall, who founded the Commonwealth Art School in Boothbay Harbor. It was there that Henneman met his future wife, Mabel Dealing, a teacher in Bangor. They married in 1918 and settled in the Queen City, where Henneman was an early member of the Bangor Art Society, an organization that remains active to this day.

In his early years in Bangor, Henneman would set up his easel in what was then known as Haymarket Square, located where KeyBank Plaza now stands. According to a Bangor Daily News article published in April 1918, in the midst of World War I, a local man named Percy Lanpher reportedly kicked over Henneman’s easel, accusing him of being a German spy, making strategic drawings of Bangor so German forces could plan an attack. Henneman informed both his attacker and the police that he was Belgian, in fact, and that Belgium, also known as Flanders, was the main European base for the British Army, immortalized in the poem “In Flanders Field.”

In addition to Henneman’s bust of Hannibal Hamlin, the Bangor Public Library has five of his paintings in its art collection, including four paintings of Bangor and one of a scene from the city of Bruges, Belgium. Henneman died in 1930, and is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery.