Hacienda La Fortuna
Francisco Oller
European Art
On View: Beaux-Arts Court, East, 3rd Floor
Francisco Oller’s painting depicts a Puerto Rican sugarcane mill (or ingenio), a major source of wealth for those who settled in the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. The mill’s Spanish owner commissioned this landscape, which features figures tending to the fields and preparing the crop for sale, as industrial smoke is released into an otherwise clear, blue sky. Oller painted this image well after Puerto Rico abolished slavery in 1873, and the relatively few workers on the mill grounds suggest the growing obsolescence of a production system that relied on forced labor.
Among the most celebrated painters to emerge from the Caribbean region in the nineteenth century, Oller spent a number of years living and studying in Paris, where he absorbed and reconfigured the radical styles of Realism, with its democratic approach to everyday subject matter, and Impressionism, with its emphasis on spontaneous and momentary effects of light and atmosphere. Together these movements helped Oller form a unique artistic vision of his native Puerto Rico.
MEDIUM
Oil on canvas
DATES
1885
DIMENSIONS
26 x 40 in. (66 x 101.6 cm)
Frame: 33 x 49 x 3 in. (83.8 x 124.5 x 7.6 cm)
(show scale)
ACCESSION NUMBER
2012.19
CREDIT LINE
Gift of Lilla Brown in memory of her husband, John W. Brown, by exchange
RIGHTS STATEMENT
No known copyright restrictions
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CAPTION
Francisco Oller (Puerto Rican, 1833-1917). Hacienda La Fortuna, 1885. Oil on canvas, 26 x 40 in. (66 x 101.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Lilla Brown in memory of her husband, John W. Brown, by exchange, 2012.19 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2012.19_PS6.jpg)
IMAGE
overall, 2012.19_PS6.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2013
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