拍品專文
Oller studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid (1851-53) and later under Thomas Couture and Charles Gleyre at the École Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin (1858-63). Influenced by the work of Gustave Courbet as well as Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, he developed a style informed by Realism and Impressionism. Oller settled permanently in Puerto Rico in 1884, and his prolific work in a variety of genres—portraiture, landscape, still life, history painting—established him as a signal figure in the history of Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and transatlantic modernism in the later nineteenth century. His masterpiece El Velorio (c. 1893), which depicts a festive wake (baquiné) traditionally held for a child, is widely lauded as the most important painting in the history of Puerto Rican art. In 2015, the Brooklyn Museum of Art organized the major exhibition, Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and his Transatlantic World, which opened at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin and later traveled to the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan.
“Oller, in different periods of his life, felt the fascination of nature in Puerto Rico, of the scenery and horizons of his native land,” noted critic José Emilio González. “The human world of our rural culture is obvious in the figures introduced into his landscapes and in structures such as the sugar mill, the bohío, and hacienda” (“Puerto Rican National Culture in the Nineteenth Century and Francisco Oller,” in Franciso Oller: A Realist-Impressionist, exh. cat., Museo de Arte de Ponce, 1983, p. 79). Removed from the commercial activity seen in his paintings of haciendas in the 1880s and 1890s, Paisaje con una lavandera hacia el río and Paisaje de jíbaros arando la tierra embody the plein-air spontaneity of Oller’s late landscapes, their impasto capturing the tropical light reflected on the green, rolling topography that stretches into the background. The landscapes were likely painted at Guaraguao, the farm owned by the Rossi family in Bayamón where he stayed between 1910 and 1912 while recovering from a lung affliction.
“Oller’s Puerto Rican landscapes, especially those that depict the unpopulated countryside, may also be read as indicators of nationhood and a desire for the establishment of a distinct identity and national symbiosis,” writes art historian Edward Sullivan. “These images were as central to the artist’s desire to develop a national visual vocabulary as were the large-scale historical narratives of painters from elsewhere.” Indeed, in works such as Landscape with Royal Palm (c. 1897; Ateneo Puertorriqueño) the palm tree—stately and dominant—becomes “an icon of national consciousness,” inseparable from the island’s struggle for sovereignty at the turn of the twentieth century (From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism, New Haven, 2014). Fifteen years later, with Puerto Rico under U.S. rule, the palm trees in Paisaje con una lavandera hacia el río and Paisaje de jíbaros arando la tierra appear rather less assertive and their placement more peripheral. Yet their presence in these late-career paintings nevertheless conveys a telluric consciousness and understanding. In each of the present paintings, Oller foregrounds the land and traditional modes of labor: a washerwoman, balancing the laundry in a basket atop her head; and two farmers, steadily plowing the steep, ruddy hillside. Their work unfolds against a warm, sunlit topography of verdant hills, the land both arable and uncultivated, dotted with the native, tropical flora so distinctive to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Oller “worked principally in the realist school, what I would dare to call boricuismo,” noted his relative, the lawyer José Paniagua, and these late landscapes render a poignant meditation on the character and destiny of Puerto Rican identity in the first decade of the twentieth century (quoted in H. Venegas, “Francisco Oller: Profile of a Puerto Rican Painter,” in Franciso Oller: A Realist-Impressionist, op. cit., p. 21).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“Oller, in different periods of his life, felt the fascination of nature in Puerto Rico, of the scenery and horizons of his native land,” noted critic José Emilio González. “The human world of our rural culture is obvious in the figures introduced into his landscapes and in structures such as the sugar mill, the bohío, and hacienda” (“Puerto Rican National Culture in the Nineteenth Century and Francisco Oller,” in Franciso Oller: A Realist-Impressionist, exh. cat., Museo de Arte de Ponce, 1983, p. 79). Removed from the commercial activity seen in his paintings of haciendas in the 1880s and 1890s, Paisaje con una lavandera hacia el río and Paisaje de jíbaros arando la tierra embody the plein-air spontaneity of Oller’s late landscapes, their impasto capturing the tropical light reflected on the green, rolling topography that stretches into the background. The landscapes were likely painted at Guaraguao, the farm owned by the Rossi family in Bayamón where he stayed between 1910 and 1912 while recovering from a lung affliction.
“Oller’s Puerto Rican landscapes, especially those that depict the unpopulated countryside, may also be read as indicators of nationhood and a desire for the establishment of a distinct identity and national symbiosis,” writes art historian Edward Sullivan. “These images were as central to the artist’s desire to develop a national visual vocabulary as were the large-scale historical narratives of painters from elsewhere.” Indeed, in works such as Landscape with Royal Palm (c. 1897; Ateneo Puertorriqueño) the palm tree—stately and dominant—becomes “an icon of national consciousness,” inseparable from the island’s struggle for sovereignty at the turn of the twentieth century (From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism, New Haven, 2014). Fifteen years later, with Puerto Rico under U.S. rule, the palm trees in Paisaje con una lavandera hacia el río and Paisaje de jíbaros arando la tierra appear rather less assertive and their placement more peripheral. Yet their presence in these late-career paintings nevertheless conveys a telluric consciousness and understanding. In each of the present paintings, Oller foregrounds the land and traditional modes of labor: a washerwoman, balancing the laundry in a basket atop her head; and two farmers, steadily plowing the steep, ruddy hillside. Their work unfolds against a warm, sunlit topography of verdant hills, the land both arable and uncultivated, dotted with the native, tropical flora so distinctive to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Oller “worked principally in the realist school, what I would dare to call boricuismo,” noted his relative, the lawyer José Paniagua, and these late landscapes render a poignant meditation on the character and destiny of Puerto Rican identity in the first decade of the twentieth century (quoted in H. Venegas, “Francisco Oller: Profile of a Puerto Rican Painter,” in Franciso Oller: A Realist-Impressionist, op. cit., p. 21).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park