By the time Celeste Woss y Gil completed El vendedor de andullo in 1938, she was already a recognized figure in the modern art movement in the Dominican Republic both as a professional painter and teacher. Trained in art schools in Havana and New York, her figurative art captured elements of a Dominican spirit. The triangular composition with two main figures—one sitting, one standing and bowing gently forward—depicts the moment of the purchase of a roll of andullo, a form of dried, compressed, fermented, and rolled tobacco for pipe smoking and chewing widely used in the Dominican Republic since pre-Columbian times. Woss y Gil was interested in human anatomy and was the first Dominican artist to use live models. Her volumetric treatment of bodies and contrasting poses indicates a carefully thought-out and balanced rendering and technique while framing the activity of the small hilly tropical town with children at play and adults going about their daily work routine. The moment of negotiation is underscored by the tension of the glance between the buyer and vendor set against a luminous cloudy sky. This painting was acquired by Thomas Watson from the artist in 1938 and exhibited the following year at the International Business Machine’s Gallery of Science and Art at the New York World’s Fair as part of a pioneering global art collection of seventy-nine countries where IBM conducted business. The painting became widely known as it traveled through the Americas in the early 1940s only increasing the artist’s fame. When the IBM collection was deaccessioned in the late 1960s, the corporation presented this and other Latin American art paintings as gifts to AMA. One of the pioneering modernist women artists in the Spanish Caribbean and Latin America, Celeste Woss y Gil was born in Santo Domingo. The daughter of a former Dominican president, Alejandro Woss y Gil, she spent her early years in the Dominican Republic, the United States and, after her father’s second presidential stint, in exile in Paris from 1903 to 1912. Her initial studies with Abelardo Rodríguez Urdaneta in Santo Domingo led her to consider art as a profession. She attended the Academia de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Cuba in the 1910s studying under the landscape painter José Joaquín Tejada. In the early 1920s she traveled to New York and enrolled at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League for a period of two years during which she studied with Ashcan realist artist George Luks and impressionist Frank DuMond from whom she learned the prismatic light palette. While her work was first exhibited in the United States in 1923 at the Art Center and the League, her New York experience shaped her interest in the didactic aspect of art. Returning to Santo Domingo in 1924, she opened the art school Escuela Estudio Woss y Gil where she introduced the practice of drawing from live models and held a solo exhibition—the first for a woman artist in the Dominican Republic. Interested in human anatomy in art, she returned to New York to study in 1928. Upon her return to Santo Domingo in 1931, Woss y Gil opened a second school, Academia de Pintura y Dibujo, which became the foremost art school throughout the 1930s. In 1936 she was named vice-president of the fine arts section of the Ateneo Dominicano. In August 1942 Woss y Gil joined the newly established Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes as founding faculty along with artists Josep Gausachs, George Hausdorf, Manolo Pascual, and José Vela Zanetti. She later became its director. Among her students were artists Gilberto Hernández Ortega and Tomás López Ramos.