Francisco Oller

Oller (birth name: Francisco Manuel Oller y Cestero was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, the third of four children of aristocratic and wealthy Spanish parents Cayetano Juan Oller y Fromesta and María del Carmen Cestero Dávila.^[3][4] When he was eleven he began to study art under the tutelage of Juan Cleto Noa, a painter who had an art academy in San Juan, Puerto Rico. There, Oller demonstrated that he had an enormous talent in art and in 1848, when Oller was fifteen years old, General Juan Prim, Governor of Puerto Rico, offered Oller the opportunity to continue his studies in Rome. However, the offer was not accepted as Oller's mother felt that he was too young to travel abroad alone.

When Oller was eighteen, he moved to

In the normal course of his day, the artist would have observed objects of quotidian use to the slaves and free persons of color with whom he regularly interacted. His world was not only the cultivated, Europeanized milieus of the Puerto Rican bourgeoisie, but also the realities of the relatively small city of San Juan, where he was born and where most of his career developed. Even during his many years of residence in Madrid and Paris, he would have carried with him the cultural baggage of his place of origin. His familiarity with the different strata of society on the Caribbean island of his birth was a constant reality as he intermingled with Realist and Impressionist artists and others who constituted his world on the other side of the Atlantic. This aspect of his personality cannot be easily separated from the other. Oller was a person of multiple cultural affinities, which allowed him to embrace what he saw abroad, but also to interiorize and reformulate those elements for purposes that conformed to his vision of tropical reality.[6]

Upon his return to Puerto Rico from France in 1866 he found himself face-to-face with slavery and he would create a number of works including El negro flageado (The negro being flogged), El castigo del negro enamorado (the punishment of the negro in love), and others depicting slavery in Puerto Rico.^[7]

Impression Period (1874–1893)

Oller spent nearly two decades in Europe working alongside the pioneers of Impressionism, and, through his travels, participated in a vibrant exchange of aesthetic ideas, forging his own brand of international modernism while engaging social issues unique to the Caribbean. During his three trips to Paris, Oller affiliated himself with Paul Cézanne, fellow Caribbean artist Camille Pissarro (born in St. Thomas), and other members of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements.^[2]

Later years

Throughout his later life and after his death, Oller was compared to Jose Campeche as one of the most outstanding figures of the arts in his country. Campeche created an impressive body of portraits and religious subjects.^[6]

In 1884, he founded an art school for young women

Oller died on May 17, 1917, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He was buried at the Santa María Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Styles and influences

Oller was a prolific painter with works ranging in topic from still-lifes and landscapes to historical events and portraiture.

The Battle of Treviño denotes a significant moment for Oller within the world of Spanish art. The painting represents an official theme of recent national history, through which the artist places himself in the tradition of military images that was of great importance in later nineteenth-century Iberian painting. The genre of battle painting is one of the least avant-garde artistic forms. Oller, an artist often associated with the "new" in art, is here going against that grain and inserting himself directly within a mode most often practiced by artists of a decidedly conservative personality. Nevertheless, he used this form as a way to experiment with the possibilities of a spontaneity and pictorial freedom within the framework of traditional subject matter.[6]

• La Escuela del Maestro Rafael Cordero (1890–1892)
  • The subject of this painting, Rafael Cordero, was the founder of the first school in Puerto Rico for both the formerly enslaved and children of enslaved persons. By the late 1820s, the school admitted male children of all races and social strata. Cordero was both the sole instructor and manual laborer, making cigars and cigarettes in his workshop, where class took place. We can see his tobacco work table in the bottom right-hand corner. The children are of different socioeconomic classes and skin tones; the artist portrays the importance and accessibility of education to all races. The two children in the foreground, one holding an egg and the other holding bread, suggests the intermingling of race. As an abolitionist himself, Oller portrays the acceptance of race in the developing country during this time. Cordero's expression is exasperated and exhausted; despite this, he persists to provide education to the children. The setting is very conservative with religious symbolism on the walls. The walls are plain and cracked. Oller portrayed his subject as glamorous, as an "unsung hero".
• El Velorio ("The Wake") (1893)^[8][9]
  • This 8-by-13-foot painting was one of the few that had survived while many of his works were lost or damaged beyond repair.  El Velorio was not seen as the most glamorous but was shown in the
    Paris Salon in 1895. Oller uses small, visible brush strokes and an emphasis on an accurate depiction of light and mastery of color in its changing qualities in his paintings. The painting depicts the wake or, in Puerto Rican Spanish, "baquiné" of a dead child laid on a table covered with flowers. Participants totally ignore the child and instead celebrate with food, drink, games, songs, dancing and prayer. The reason for this is that they believe it is a time for celebration for the child has become an angel and should be properly sent off. All the while the parents are mourning over the loss of their child and some are consoling the mother.  Oller’s painting is considered a Puerto Rican national treasure and is not allowed to leave the Museum of History, Anthropology, and Art at the University of Puerto Rico's Río Piedras campus.^[10]
• Bodegón con piñas
• El Cesante
• Hacienda La Fortuna de Ponce (1885)[11]^[12]
• La Ceiba de Ponce (1888)^[13]

Legacy and remembrance

Oller was responsible for bringing Realism and Impressionism to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Combining them with the artistic traditions of San Juan, he revolutionized the school of painting in Puerto Rico and throughout the Caribbean region. Oller also helped bring outside world events by drawing them and displaying them publicly. Many Puerto Rican artists have followed in Oller's footsteps, including Ramón Fradé (1875-1954) and Miguel Pou (1880-1968).^[9]

The town of

• 
  Hacienda La Fortuna, 1885. Brooklyn Museum
• 
  La Escuela del Maestro Rafael Cordero (1890–1892)
• 
  El Velorio (1893)
• 
  Estudio del Natural, (1866–72)^[14]

See also

• List of Puerto Ricans — Painters and sculptors

References