Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico Receives Important Gift

The Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR) augments its collection thanks to an important gift from the Ferrer-Rincón family: Trapiche meladero, a work by Francisco Oller. This work belongs to a decisive period in Latin American art, the mid-Nineteenth Century, when Puerto Rican painters educated in Europe decide to engage local topics, achieving a kind of painting infused with greater brightness, in accordance with the light of the tropics. Besides its aesthetic value, Trapiche meladero possesses great historical and documentary importance, as Francisco Oller represents a rural scene and a model of trapiche based in animal traction, a technology that was already vanishing towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, leaving very few vestiges that have survived into our own times. Also, this work was among the 46 selected for La exposición de Puerto Rico, the exhibition presented in 1893 ¿ while the artist was still alive ¿ at the Palacio de Santurce. Trapiche meladero will be incorporated into the Museum¿s permanent collection during its redesign, scheduled to begin towards the end of the year.