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Guided tour to the Puerto Rico Art Museum in San Juan’s Santurce neighborhood. Learn about Puerto Rican art through the work of five eblematic painters: José Campeche, Francisco Oller, Rafael Tufiño, Myrna Báez and Miguel Pou.
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Audio Guide Transcript: Puerto Rico Art Museum
Welcome to this Free Audio Guide to the Puerto Rico Art Museum. FreeAudioGuides.com delivers the best and most immersive tours of your favorite travel destinations, in a podcast format, always free, with nothing to rent and no app to download.
My name is Lara and my name is Armando, and we are your local guides. Today, we’re taking you on a trip through nearly 300 years of Puerto Rican art history. We’ll look at the work of five emblematic painters to give you a sense of the broad scope of Puerto Rican artistic achievement. Our selection necessarily leaves out many other wonderful creators, and we invite you to not focus exclusively on our curated list, but to also wander about the galleries and the sculpture garden, and find other works that appeal to you.
You can do the tour at your own pace, but we estimate that it should take you about 35 minutes to get from gallery to gallery and enjoy the audio content we’ve prepared for each of the five artists and their work.
To navigate your way through this tour, please click on the link in the episode notes for our exclusive map to the museum which indicates exactly where we’d like you to go for each section of this guide. We’ll play this sound ____ whenever we suggest you pause the podcast to make your way to the next work of art.
Our podcasts are also divided into chapters. Many podcast apps, like Apple Podcasts and Overcast support this feature. Each artist we’ll discuss has his or her own title and chapter, allowing you to quickly browse, skip ahead and navigate directly to different sections of the guide.
To get you oriented, please note that when you enter the museum you’re on the third level. We’ll start the tour and spend most of our time on the fourth level, and we’ll end our tour on the third. By the way, in case you’re curious, the museum’s building was originally the municipal hospital.
Once you’re done with this tour, be sure to check out our other podcast tours, for locations like El Morro and San Cristobal castles, and our weekly podcast, Puerto Rico Now, available on this same feed, where we’ll give you locals’ access to everything that’s happening while you’re here visiting the island. Find out about the most exciting parties, festivals, free events, new restaurants and family-friendly gatherings going on right now, this very week, in Puerto Rico.
To help us grow, please leave us a five star review on your podcast app of choice, subscribe to the show, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as FreeAudioGuides, and be sure to support our advertisers. If you want to go a step further, you can show us, your tour guides, some love at our virtual tip jar at puertorico.freeaudioguides.com. We’ve also placed a link to the tip jar in the show notes.
Now, let’s get started! Please head to the fourth level of the museum and go to the gallery labeled with the number one on the map. Press play on your podcast app once you’re there.
In this gallery we’ll look at four paintings by José Campeche.
Campeche was Puerto Rico’s first major painter. He was born in 1751 in San Juan. His father, a slave who bought his own freedom, came to prominence himself as an artisan painting adornments in churches throughout Puerto Rico. His wealth allowed him to purchase two stone houses in the city, a plot of land and two African slaves. His mother was a Spaniard from the Canary Islands.
The younger Campeche’s artistic accomplishments and international renown are all the more impressive given there is no historical evidence that he ever left Puerto Rico to train in the great European schools. He learned to paint from his father and by copying prints from the Old World. Later, in his twenties, he studied at the hands of the artist, Luis Paret, who had been exiled to Puerto Rico by the King of Spain. Luckily for Campeche, Paret was an accomplished artist, considered second only to Goya in the pantheon of Spanish painters of the late eighteenth century.
The four paintings in this room are both extraordinary exemplars of his work and of the predominant styles of his era, and historical documents in their own right that illuminate important chapters in Puerto Rican history.
The first painting we’ll take a look at is the Ex voto of the Holy Family. An ex voto is an offering to a saint or divinity in the Catholic tradition given in fulfillment of a vow, in gratitude or in devotion.
This specific piece is an example of Campeche’s Late Baroque or Rococo style, a highly ornamental and theatrical manner of painting, showing the influence of Luis Paret on his craft. The color palette, with its hues of light pastels, pink and blue, is typical of this style.
On the lower left hand corner of the panting, you’ll notice a Carmelite nun with three black persons standing behind her. This is the first representation in Puerto Rican art of African slaves. They would have been part of the nun’s dowry, a gift of property, money and other assets, often required of families before their daughters could join a convent. The ex-voto may have been commissioned as part of this gift to the religious order.
The next painting we’ll look at is the Virgin of Bethlehem. This work is one of perhaps as many as five hundred images of the Virgin of Bethlehem painted by Campeche. It is a replica of a late-fifteenth century Flemish painting venerated since the sixteenth century in one of the old city’s churches, today known as San José. The original Flemish work was stolen from the church in 1972.
Demand for Campeche’s rendition of this image exploded after 1797. In that year, the English attacked San Juan. The defenders’ victory against the invaders, was popularly attributed to the intercession of Mary, invoked by the faithful under this particular portrayal of the Virgin.
In typical baroque style, the deep red and green of the Virgin’s robes are offset by her blond hair. In a concession to eighteenth century moral prudery, Campeche adds a piece of white cloth around the Virgin’s breast, which in the Flemish original was represented in a more realistic manner.
Notice also both figures’ hands and the body of the child. Campeche’s grasp of the human anatomy was not his strongest suit. In the conservative San Juan of the eighteenth century, Campeche likely never did nude studies.
The next painting we’ll look at is the Ex-voto of the Siege of the City of San Juan. This piece was painted for the chapel of the Virgin of Bethlehem in San José church. Because victory over the English in 1797 was attributed to the Virgin of Bethlehem, this painting was made in gratitude for her intercession.
Interest in this work rests mostly with its historic value. You can see part of the old city’s buildings, and San Cristobal Castle on the far left hand side of the painting. Out in the Atlantic, two English ships fire on Spanish positions. If you’d like to learn more about this important battle, listen to our podcast tour for San Cristobal Castle.
Campeche, who himself took up arms to defend San Juan during the English attack, and who was a devout Catholic, wrote the following along the bottom of the piece:
“The general, Christian and pious opinion of the inhabitants of this noble island is that we owe our success against the siege and the rapid withdrawal of the English mainly to our Holy Mother, who, by the constant prayers of the faithful to their beloved image of the Virgin of Bethlehem, has been always the protector of those who in urgent need have devoutly invoked her."
The last painting we’ll look at in this room is Campeche’s The Daughters of Governor Ramón de Castro. Painted in 1797, it depicts the daughters of the Spanish official who, as was customary in the age, wielded both civil and military authority over the island. Governor de Castro in particular led the successful defense against the English that we’ve referenced in discussing the prior two pieces. Art historians do not know if this work was a gift to the governor for his victory, or if it was made as a memento of his daughters. In the painting the girls are depicted at four and two years of age and surviving early childhood was no small feat in the world of the late eighteenth century. In fact, the girls died just a few years after sitting for this portrait.
The painting is another example of Campeche’s use of the subdued Rococo color palette. Further, the artist clearly wanted to depict a coalescing hybrid culture that took from both the native and the European. The girls, born in the Americas to European parents, are dressed in the Empire style, in vogue then in France. However, the older girl holds a maraca, or rattle, made of a hollowed out calabash gourd and decorated with native, likely Taíno, motifs. A pineapple on the floor further lends weight to this interpretation.
To his contemporaries, Campeche embodied the growing sense of a Puerto Rican national identity. His life and accomplishments came at a time when, after three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, there was an awakening native culture, unique and distinct from that of the metropolis. His most well-known works, coming on the heels of the successful defense of San Juan in 1797, did as much as the military victory of that year to cement a sense of pride in the collective accomplishment of not mere Spanish subjects, but instead, of the Puerto Rican people.
Let’s take a break here. When you’re ready to continue, head to the spot marked with the number 2 on the map.
Welcome back! We’ll now look at four paintings by Francisco Oller.
Oller, born in 1833 to a prosperous family, is perhaps Puerto Rico’s most renowned artist. His family home in Old San Juan stood next to the Capilla del Cristo where el Parque de las Palomas, the Pigeon Park, is located in the present day.
In 1848, at just fifteen years of age, Oller took on a job as a clerk at the Royal Treasury of San Juan. He was fired when he was discovered making caricatures of high-ranking Treasury officials. However, these early works were good enough to call the attention of Puerto Rico’s governor, who, recognizing his talent, offered him a public stipend to study art in Rome.
Though, Oller’s mother forbid him from leaving for Europe so young, he would eventually travel to Spain in 1851, becoming the first Puerto Rican to travel to Europe to study painting. This would be the first of four long stays in the Old World. In total, Oller would spend nearly 21 years, a quarter of his life, studying, teaching, traveling and living in France, Italy and Spain.
Oller’s travels placed him at the center of this period’s artistic developments and revolutions. During his first stay in France, beginning in 1858, he met the likes of Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, and the writer Emile Zola. Oller’s first known student, was none other than Paul Cézanne, with whom he maintained a close friendship until a falling out between the two in 1895, for reasons lost to history. It is also likely that Oller first introduced Camille Pissarro to Cézanne, the former having been born in St. Thomas, a common Caribbean background perhaps bringing them together in faraway Paris.
Oller is recognized as the only Latin American painter to have played a role in the development of Impressionism. He was undoubtedly the first to bring the luminous quality of the Impressionists to the New World.
Oller himself utilized different styles as it suited him for the diverse subjects of his paintings. His portraits and still lifes draw from the Realist tradition while his landscapes are predominantly Impressionistic.
The four paintings we’ll look at demonstrate this stylistic dexterity. The first two are the still lifes, arguably his best. Setting aside the usual apples and oranges, he elevates the coconut and the plantain to the realm of the artistically sublime and imbues them with monumentality. These works, nearly photo-realistic in execution, speak to Oller’s love of his native land and of his interest in placing Puerto Rican art in the larger context of a universal, or at least Western, aesthetic tradition.
The other two paintings, both landscapes, are clearly in an Impressionist or proto-Impressionist style, and eschew the attempt to recreate nature, instead capturing the momentary impression of the landscape, and the light against the Puerto Rican countryside from the perspective of the painter. Notice the short, thick strokes, which capture the essence of the scene rather than its details, as in the prior two still lifes.
These idyllic representations, however, conceal the harsh realities of the rural poor and working class in this era, paid miserable wages and left idle and destitute when the five or six month harvest season came to an end. These works speak to Oller’s privileged background, rather than to the social reality of the time.
Francisco Oller came to personify in the late nineteenth century, as Campeche did in the late eighteenth, the ever consolidating and growing sense of a native Puerto Rican culture, distinct from the Spanish, even as he contributed to the old country’s artistic milieu. As a matter of fact, the renowned Spanish historian and critic, Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño, claimed that Oller introduced Impressionism into Spain, and for a time, like Goya before him, Oller was the official court painter at the Royal Palace in Madrid.
Francisco Oller would die in 1917 in the same hospital complex that by the late 1920s would also feature the building you’re in now.
We’ll now look at the work of Rafael Tufiño. You’ve probably already noticed it as it’s the huge mural, titled La Plena, in this same gallery.
Tufiño was born in 1922 in Brooklyn to immigrants from Puerto Rico but moved to the working class neighborhood of Puerta de Tierra on the outskirts of Old San Juan by the time he was ten. He was a leader in the island’s Fifties Generation, a loose-knit group of young artists who sought to create a visual language that would affirm Puerto Rico’s distinct national identity. Stylistically and ideologically, these artists owe a debt to Mexican Muralism. Both movements shared the goal of conferring monumental scale and importance to the native cultural expressions of each country. Tufiño became particularly identified with this populist artistic current and was often referred to as “the people’s painter”.
This massive mural, 15 feet tall and 30 feet wide, is perhaps one of the movement’s most exemplary works. The title refers to a native-born Puerto Rican music and dance genre - la plena. Its origins date back to the late nineteenth century in the sugar cane fields of the island’s southern coast, in and around the city of Ponce. Its roots are mainly African though it also blends Spanish musical traditions. The main instrument used to perform plenas is the pandero, a handheld drum similar to a tambourine but lacking the latter instrument’s distinctive metal jingles. You can actually see a group of musicians playing panderos in the lower right hand corner of the mural.
The early history of this popular musical genre was marred by the often racist and morally high-handed reaction of the elites against la plena. Ponce’s police chief at one point sought to close venues where the music was performed and even proposed banning the dance wherever alcohol was available. By the middle of the twentieth century, plena had found wider acceptance as a popular musical form, though in the 1950’s when Tufiño painted this mural, it was not considered an important cultural expression. Tufiño’s mural did much to elevate and legitimize the genre as a part of the Puerto Rican people’s common heritage.
Plena was referred to as a “newspaper in song”, as compositions would often address current events. The mural depicts twelve such traditional plena songs, deftly blending different stories into one larger narrative touching on recurring themes in Puerto Rico’s history.
For example, the large greenish blue figure at the center of the mural is the anthropomorphic representation of a hurricane from a plena titled “Temporal, temporal” or “the storm”. To the right of this scene is a shark, the main character in the lyrics of another plena titled, “Tintorera del mar”. The song tells the story of an American lawyer who came to Puerto Rico to defend the interests of an American-owned sugar mill during a workers’ strike. Legend has it that the lawyer, enchanted by the island’s beaches, went for a swim and was attacked and killed by a shark. In the mural, the shark becomes an allegory for Puerto Rico’s resistance against foreign encroachment.
Behind the musician on the extreme right, a man with a mustache in a red shirt looks out from the mural; this is the artist himself, who playfully included his self-portrait, appropriately, amid the masses.
Let’s take a break here. When you’re ready to continue, head to the spot marked with the number 4 on the map.
Welcome back! We’ll now look at a painting titled, Highway to the South, by Myrna Báez.
Báez is one of Puerto Rico’s most important and distinguished artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. She was born on the island in 1931 to an upper middle class family. In 1951 she embarked for Spain planning to study medicine, but instead enrolled in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in the capital city of Madrid. Spain at the time was trying to cast off its reputation as an isolated country. Neutral at least officially during World War II, the regime of Francisco Franco was a semi-fascist dictatorship. The art world she encountered in Madrid was one of intense creativity, radical experimentation and struggle to break with stifling tradition.
She returned to Puerto Rico in 1957 and settled permanently in the family home in the Hato Rey neighborhood of San Juan, in what would also be her art studio.
During her long and illustrious career she would dedicate much of her time to teaching and profoundly influenced younger generations of artists. She also experimented widely with technique and in the use of color.
Her body of work shares points in common with Oller. Like the earlier master, Báez’s art, though of a universal nature and in conversation with modern artistic currents, is firmly rooted in the place of its creation, that is Puerto Rico. However, whereas Oller’s take on the Puerto Rican countryside in the two landscapes we observed was bucolic and nostalgic, Báez takes a more critical stance. Báez herself explained her interest in depicting the landscape of the island:
“I have attempted to be - and have affirmed the fact - that I am a Puerto Rican artist. I do not want to do landscapes for tourists, nor make pictures of the sentimental, nostalgic or folkloric […] our landscape interests me because they’re destroying it, I’m interested in those things that are Puerto Rican."
Highway to the South is an example of her interest in the Puerto Rican landscape and in the destructive power of so-called progress. Although the lines and colors of the painting may strike you as abstract, it is a figurative representation of a segment of the highway that connects San Juan to the southern city of Ponce. Painted in 1974, just two years after the inauguration of the first stretch of this road, it portrays both the changing natural environment of the island and also the urban middle class’s fascination with the automobile and the modern.
The work also illustrates her stylistic experimentation with color during the early 1970s. Dubbed by art critic Samuel Cherson as “photo negativism”, you’ll notice that some of the colors seem inverted as in undeveloped film. Báez was adapting these concepts from photography, of positives and negatives, in her painting.
Let’s take a break here. When you’re ready to continue, head down to the third level, that is the floor on which you entered the museum, to the spot marked with the number 5 on the map.
Welcome back! We’ll finish the tour looking at the painting titled, Julia in the Kitchen, by Miguel Pou.
Pou was a native of the southern city of Ponce, the only painter we feature in this guide not from San Juan. He was born in 1880 to a middle class family and by the year 1900 had became a public school teacher and soon thereafter a school principal. He remained a teacher until 1922 when he was able to dedicate himself fully to his art. A consummate educator, he founded an art school in Ponce and for forty years taught painting there.
Though he showed great artistic promise and talent even in his teens, it would not be until 1919, at the age of 39, when he was able to go abroad to study art. Pou is the first Puerto Rican artist of note to study in the United States, specifically in The Art Students League of New York and later in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Pou’s early achievements are all the more notable given the late start to his formal training and the lackluster artistic milieu in which he was formed; though Ponce thrived in the performing arts, the city did not have important museums at the time nor did it have a notable plastic arts scene.
Some disputed sources claim Pou was a student of Oller’s.What is not in dispute is his role as an important link between Oller and more recent artists from the middle of the twentieth century. In fact, Pou considered his main influence to be the Impressionists but only with respect to the use of color and light in his work. Pou recognized that the themes and subjects of his work were entrenched in the classical and the traditional. In contrast to Myrna Báez and her critical portrayal of the outcomes of progress, Pou looks back. It is still, however, a critique of what is lost - the popular character types and the virgin landscapes - but instead of zooming in on its destruction, he evokes its prior beauty.
Julia in the Kitchen reflects this philosophy. As one curator put it, Pou was fascinated with the ideal of “the young country girl, devout and chaste, who is vanishing among us”. Julia, identified in a catalog of his work published by his widow as a “country girl from Aibonito”, a small rural town in the island’s mountainous interior, is just such a subject. A critic of American cultural clout in Puerto Rico, Pou portrays a nostalgic view of the island’s fading way of life. Julia exudes the patriotic values of humility and simple living that he believed were fast disappearing.
This intimate portrait of a young woman preparing a meal with that Puerto Rican culinary staple, the plantain, is a vignette of daily life that Pou attempts to rescue and preserve from the ravages of time, progress and foreign influence.
We hope you’ve loved this audio guide as much as we loved putting it together for you.
Remember there’s more content on this same podcast feed: more audio guides are up now and we’re putting up new ones all the time. There’s also Puerto Rico Now, updated every week, with insider tips to what you might be interested in doing while you’re here visiting.
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Until our next adventure together, enjoy your visit to Puerto Rico!