After permanently returned to San Juan in 1885, Francisco Oller applied his avant garde style to wor

After permanently returned to San Juan in 1885, Francisco Oller applied his avant garde style to works that addressing the island’s everyday social, political, and economic realities. Here he thrived, portraying the island’s teachers, poets, planters, and politicians—local, Spanish, and (after the Spanish-American War) U.S. subjects alike.In Hacienda La Fortuna (1885), Oller deftly captures nature’s fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, including in the foreground the morning mist of a Puerto Rican winter, with quick, broken brushstrokes. Oller completed this painting in the winter of 1885 for the Barcelona émigré José Gallart Forgas, who had commissioned him to paint portraits of all five of his Puerto Rican sugar mill complexes, or ingenios.Puerto Rico’s sugar production, like that of almost all Caribbean islands, depended on the labor of enslaved people. When the island abolished slavery in 1873, the sugar industry declined dramatically. In his sparsely populated “portraits” of Gallart’s ingenios, Oller seems to refer to the increasing obsolescence of a commerce once fueled by the sweat of human chattel.Learn more about Hacienda La Fortuna from our 2012 blog post about its acquisition, and see it on view through January 3rd. -- source link

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