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(b. 1833, Bayamón, Puerto Rico; d. Cataño, Puerto Rico, 1917). Considered the father of Puerto Rican art, Francisco Oller y Cestero brought European painting styles to bear on the people and landscapes of the island. He studied in Madrid at the Academia de San Fernando (1851-1853) and then in Paris at the École Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin. He was acquainted with Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and Armand Guillaumin, but his main source of influence was the nineteenth-century realist, Gustave Courbet. Oller, in both his realist and impressionist paintings, sought to improve the lot of his island's people rather than develop avant-garde modes of representation. The social consciousness reflected in his work set a precedent for many later Puerto Rican artists. In 1868 he helped found the Free Academy of Drawing and Painting and in 1869 published a manual on drawing and painting from nature. Although many of his plans to foment the visual arts in Puer
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