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...