In 1885 Oller was commissioned by José Gallart, an enterprising émigré from Barcelona, to paint “portraits” of his five Puerto Rican sugar-mill complexes, or ingenios. Oller would complete only two. Later that year, Gallart returned to Spain and displayed Hacienda La Fortuna and Hacienda La Serrano (also on view) in the study of his home outside Barcelona as a reminder of the source of his newfound American wealth—Caribbean sugar.

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.

This is one of Oller’s rare interior scenes from his first years in Paris. It evokes the domestic intimacy of a couple sewing and reading. Details such as the objects on the desk and chair, the diminutive pictures on the wall, and the small shelf for glass objects are described with subtle precision. The poses of the man and woman are probably derived from famous works of art by Johannes Vermeer and Gustave Courbet that Oller had seen in Paris. The skull that the young man holds in his right hand is probably a reference to the swift passage of time.

This famous painting shows a well-known figure of Puerto Rican history. Rafael Cordero, whose parents had been enslaved, founded the first classroom for male children of color on the island. Some of Puerto Rico’s most distinguished intellectuals emerged from this school.

Here, the boys are engaged in many activities, some of which disturb the class and appear to provoke Cordero’s exasperation. Nonetheless, Cordero firmly believed in the importance of education for all sectors of the island’s society, as did Oller, who founded a number of art academies in Puerto Rico. Many of Oller’s students were women, whose careers were often later halted by marriage and subsequent social pressure to give up professional aspirations. This picture may thus be understood as emblematic of the importance of an enlightened populace.

Oller first met Paul Cézanne in Paris in 1861, soon after the latter’s arrival from his native Aix-en-Provence in April of that year. The two painters prepared submissions together to the 1865 Paris Salon exhibition and developed a close friendship. In his depiction of Cézanne, Oller chose a naturalist style that favored pictorial illusionism with clear separations of background, middle ground, and foreground.

Within a few years of Oller’s execution of this work, Cézanne wrote to his childhood friend, the writer Émile Zola, that “all pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as good as those executed in the open air. When out-of-doors scenes are represented, the contrasts between the figures and the ground are astonishing and the landscape is magnificent.”

Here, on the grounds of a Caribbean sugar plantation, two luxuriously dressed mixed-race sisters enjoy a walk with their mother, children, and eight African servants. After the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), the British government sent the Roman painter Agostino Brunias to Dominica, one of its newly acquired Caribbean territories. Although Brunias was originally commissioned to promote upper-class plantation life, his paintings soon exposed the artificialities of the region’s racial hierarchies.

The Danish Caribbean island of Saint Thomas was home to a substantial population of free people of African descent. Journeying traders, like the women depicted here, are believed to have distributed the instructions for an 1848 insurrection on the neighboring island of Saint Croix. That revolt led to the immediate abolition of slavery in the Danish West Indies.

Camille Pissarro, a native of Saint Thomas, would befriend Oller in 1858 in Paris, where Pissarro completed this Caribbean landscape.

Beginning in 1884, Winslow Homer—one of the most admired U.S. artists of the nineteenth century—made numerous winter visits to tropical locations. Watercolor became his preferred medium while traveling. This light-filled composition is one of at least six depictions Homer completed in 1885 of everyday scenes featuring local market women on the coral streets of the Bahamian capital, Nassau.