(b Bayamón, Jun 17, 1833; d Cataño, May 17, 1917).
Puerto Rican painter. He studied from 1851 to 1853 at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid under Federico de Madrazo y Küntz and in Paris from 1858 to 1863 under Thomas Couture and Charles Gleyre at the École Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin and at the Académie Suisse. There he met Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and Armand Guillaumin, who together with Couture and the work of Courbet influenced his work towards Realism and Impressionism. His masterpiece The Wake (1893; Río Piedras, U. Puerto Rico, Mus. Antropol., Hist. & A.), with its penetrating insights into 19th-century Puerto Rican rural society, is a monumental tribute to the artistic tenets championed by Courbet.
Oller, however, cannot be characterized exclusively as a Realist or Impressionist. In the course of his prolific career he produced portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, adapting his style to the subject. In the Ponce Silk-Cotton Tree...
