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.

Biography

Early years

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.</blockquote>

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 ("the flogged black man"), ("the punishment of the black man in love"), and others depicting slavery in Puerto Rico.

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. While he was involved with several painting movements, Realism, Naturalism and Impressionism; he is best known for his Impressionist works.

  • El estudiante (1874)
  • The Basilica of Lourdes from the Gave River (1876–77)
  • Battle of Treviño (1879)
  • Oller painted Colonel Juan Contreras as the central figure during a battle that took place on July 8, 1875. The battle was part of the Carlist Wars, a 19th-century war over the succession of the Spanish throne. Oller painted this during his final visit to Europe, where he was appointed as the official painter of the Spanish Court of King Alfonso XII. The artist opposed the conventions of realism and precision of more traditional military paintings. Instead, he uses Impressionistic style to capture the atmosphere and drama of the moment. Dabs of color blend together to create an out-of-focus effect. Oller also effectively used lines to draw attention to Colonel Contreras; the clouds, hills, and soldiers direct focus to the central figure. The author Edward J. Sullivan wrote: <blockquote>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.
  • Portrait of Angelina Serracante (1885–88)
  • Road with Thatched Huts (1890)
  • George W. Davis (1900)
  • Landscape with Royal Palm (1910)

The municipality of Cataño in Puerto Rico, named a high school after him, and the City of New York renamed P.S.61 in The Bronx P.S. Francisco Oller. There is also a Francisco Oller Library in the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico (School of Plastic Arts and Design of Puerto Rico) in Old San Juan. The Francisco Oller Museum, where many artists, such as Tomás Batista, exhibit their work, is located in the city of Bayamón. In Buffalo, New York there is a Francisco Oller and Diego Rivera Museum of Art where Manuel Rivera-Ortiz and other artists have exhibited their work.

<gallery widths="200" heights="200" perrow="6" mode="packed">

File:"Estudio del Natural" by Francisco Oller.jpg|Estudio del Natural (1866–72)

File:ElestudianteOller.jpg|L'Étudiant (1874) Musée d'Orsay

File:Francisco Oller - La Batalla de Trevino.jpg|La batalla de Treviño (1879) Museo de Arte de Ponce

File:Hacienda La Fortuna.jpg|Hacienda La Fortuna (1885) Brooklyn Museum

File:Francisco Oller - La ceiba de Ponce.jpg|La ceiba de Ponce (1888) Museo de Arte de Ponce

File:La escuela del Maestro Cordero by Francisco Oller.jpg|La Escuela del Maestro Rafael Cordero (1890–1892) Ateneo Puertorriqueño

File:El Velorio by Francisco Oller.jpg|El Velorio (1893) Museum of the UPR

File:Francisco Oller - Hacienda Aurora.jpg|Hacienda Aurora (1898) Museo de Arte de Ponce

File:Retrato de EMdeHostos por Francisco Oller.jpg|Portrait of Eugenio María de Hostos (1903) Museum of the UPR

</gallery>

See also

  • List of Puerto Ricans &mdash; Painters and sculptors

References

Further reading

  • El Museo