When Oller was eighteen, he moved to Madrid, Spain, where he studied painting at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, under the tutelage of Don Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz, director of the Prado Museum.

He also became a friend of fellow Puerto Ricans Ramón Emeterio Betances y Alacán and Salvador Carbonell del Toro, who were expatriates in France because of their political beliefs.

The author Edward J. Sullivan describes in his book, From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism:In the normal course of his day, the artist would have observed objects of quotidian use to the slaves and free persons of color with whom he regularly interacted.

His world was not only the cultivated, Europeanized milieus of the Puerto Rican bourgeoisie, but also the realities of the relatively small city of San Juan, where he was born and where most of his career developed.

His familiarity with the different strata of society on the Caribbean island of his birth was a constant reality as he intermingled with Realist and Impressionist artists and others who constituted his world on the other side of the Atlantic.

Oller was a person of multiple cultural affinities, which allowed him to embrace what he saw abroad, but also to interiorize and reformulate those elements for purposes that conformed to his vision of tropical reality.

[7] Oller spent nearly two decades in Europe working alongside the pioneers of Impressionism, and, through his travels, participated in a vibrant exchange of aesthetic ideas, forging his own brand of international modernism while engaging social issues unique to the Caribbean.

During his three trips to Paris, Oller affiliated himself with Paul Cézanne, fellow Caribbean artist Camille Pissarro (born in St. Thomas), and other members of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements.

Rarely, if ever, depicting the negative associations of enslaved or indentured labor, they attempted to create nostalgic views of the "old homestead," or a faraway venue of nostalgia.

While Oller’s plantation pictures were executed in a somewhat different spirit, they nonetheless pertain to this genre that played a significant role throughout the development of visualization in a Caribbean context over a period of some 150 years.

[6] Oller was influenced by Barbizon school painter Jean-François Millet to paint in this way, allowing him to provide a realistic depiction of the life of Puerto Ricans in their historical context.

His main source of influence in his early years comes from two painters, the Spaniard Luis Paret y Alcázar and, most significantly, the Puerto Rican José Campeche y Jordán.