Francisco oller art style

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Francisco Oller y Cestero UPR Museum of History, Anthropology and Art collection

Artist, Painter and Educator

Francisco Oller y Cestero was the first Puerto Rican painter educated in Europe. He was a pioneer in Latin America in impressionism and realism styles. He is known as one of the most famous Puerto Rican artists of all time. He was able to capture the reality of his era and comment through his art on the society in which he lived.

Oller was born in San Juan on June 17, 1833, to a wealthy family. He began to study painting at 11 years of age with Juan Cleto Noa. At age 14, he painted a reproduction of a portrait that Campeche had done of his grandfather. A year later, Governor Juan Prim offered him a scholarship to study in Rome, but his family would not let him go because of his young age. At 18 years of age, however, he left for Madrid to study at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts under the tutelage of painter Federico Madrazo. Two years later, he returned to the island, but he soon went back to Europe, this time to France, to continue his studies. At vario

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Francisco Manuel Oller

Francisco Manuel Oller (1833-1917) was a major Puerto Rican artist whose portraits of governors and slaves and landscapes of sugar plantations and peasant shacks celebrate both the island's natural beauty and its social strife. A friend to the great French artists of the late nineteenth century, he took part in the French avant-garde movements of Realism and Impressionism. Oller is cited as the only Latin American painter to play a role in the development of Impressionism.

Although he lived for many years in France and Spain, Oller always returned to Puerto Rico. "Francisco Oller was the first painter to ponder deeply on the meaning of Puerto Rico," wrote Haydée Venegas in Francisco Oller: Realist-Impressionist, the catalogue of a 1983 Oller retrospective at the Ponce Art Museum in Puerto Rico. His paintings of island life convey a strong, but not uncritical, passion for his native land. Oller's work was a "profoundly moving perspective on the virtues and defects of the Puerto Rico of his era," wrote Carlos Romero-Barcelóin Francisco-Oller: Realist

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Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World

The painter Francisco Oller contributed greatly to the development of modern art in both Europe and the Caribbean and revolutionized the school of painting in his native Puerto Rico.

Oller emerged from the small art world of San Juan in the 1840s, spending twenty years in Madrid and Paris, where he was inspired by the art of Gustave Courbet and joined the avant-garde circles of such artists as Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet. While European Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism formed a critical jumping-off point for Oller’s aesthetic, his most important source of inspiration was Puerto Rico, where he painted tropical landscapes, still lifes with indigenous fruits and vegetables, and portraits of distinguished artists and intellectuals.

This is the first U.S. exhibition to present Oller’s work within both its New and Old World contexts.

Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World is organized by Richard Aste, Curator of European