Francisco Oller

Francisco Manuel Oller y Cestero (June 17, 1833 – May 17, 1917) was a Puerto Rican painter, and the only Latin American artist to have played a role in the development of Impressionism. One of the most distinguished transatlantic painters of his day, Oller helped transform painting in the Caribbean.

Oller was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, the third of four children of aristocratic and wealthy parents Cayetano Juan Oller y Fromesta and María del Carmen Cestero Dávila. His paternal grandparents were from Catalonia and his maternal side had roots in Puerto Rico since the seventeenth century. Oller was baptised in the Cathedral of San Juan. 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 Madrid, Spain, where he studied painting at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, under the tutelage of Don Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz, director of the Prado Museum. In 1858, he moved to Paris, France where he studied under Thomas Couture. Later he enrolled to study art in the Louvre under the instruction of Gustave Courbet. During his free time, Oller, who had a baritone type of singing voice, worked and participated in local Italian operas. He frequently visited cafés where he met with fellow artists. He also became a friend of fellow Puerto Ricans Ramón Emeterio Betances and Salvador Carbonell del Toro, who were expatriates in France due to their political beliefs. In 1859, Oller exhibited some of his artistic works next to those of Bazille, Renoir, Monet, and Sisley. For a short time, Paul Cézanne was one of Oller's students, although their professional relationship deteriorated with time. By 1865, Oller was the first Puerto Rican and Hispanic Impressionist artist. In 1868, he founded the Free Academy of Art of Puerto Rico.

Oller's paintings were a big contribution of history during this time. His paintings showed conflicts and daily lives of people outside of his home country as well as subjects internally. The author Edward J. Sullivan describes in his book, From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism:

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.

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 flogged black man"), El castigo del negro enamorado ("the punishment of the black man in love"), and others depicting slavery in Puerto Rico.

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.

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. In 1884, he founded an art school for young women, which later became known as the Universidad Nacional. In 1871, Spain honored Oller by naming him a member of the Order of Carlos III, and a year later he became the official painter of the royal court of Amadeo I. Oller developed an interest in bringing out the reality of Puerto Rico's landscape, its people and culture through his works of art. Oller's paintings can be found in museums worldwide, including the Musée d'Orsay in France. 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.