Francis Luis Mora (1874-1940) Uruguayan/American, Oil on Canvas. Depicts a Parisian street scene, with a group of schoolchildren passing a woman with a picnic basket and a soldier in uniform. Signed and dated '96 lower left. Attributed (incorrectly spelled) on reverse. Framed.
Overall: 23 1/2 x 27 in.
Sight: 14 1/2 x 18 in.
Depth: 3 in.
#3648 .
Francis Luis Mora was born July 27th, 1874 in Montevideo, Uruguay. His father, Domingo Mora, was a sculptor from Catalonia, Spain. He had a younger brother, Joseph Jacinto “Jo” Mora, who would go on to become a photographer and author. The Moras fled Uruguay for Catalonia during an insurgency in 1877. In 1880 they moved to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where Domingo accepted a position with the A.H. White Terra Cotta Company. While he was a child Mora’s father oversaw his early education in the arts, and he produced hundreds of drawings and watercolors, experimenting with oils and temperas later on. At the age of fifteen Mora enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he studied under the American Impressionists Edmund Charles Tarbell and Frank Weston Benson. In 1892 Mora went to the Art Students League of New York, studying with Henry Siddons Mowbray, and began receiving commissions for illustrations in popular magazines. His formal art education was completed in 1893, when he was just 19 years old. In 1896 Mora traveled to Europe with his mother, visiting France and Italy before traveling to Spain. They stayed with family in Barcelona and then headed to Madrid, where Mora happened to meet the impressionist William Merritt Chase in the Museo del Prado. Chase introduced him to the art of Diego Velázquez and other Spanish Old Masters. Over the course of many visits to the Prado, Mora practiced and refined his technique by painting copies of Velasquez’s works. In 1900 Mora married the daughter of the mayor of Perth Amboy, Sonia Brown Compton. In 1904 Mora was made an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design and became the first Hispanic Full Member in 1906. Mora won numerous medals and awards within the New York artistic community, including the Rothschild Prize, the Shaw Purchase Prize at the Salmagundi Club, and a gold medal at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco. Mora taught illustration classes at both Chase School of Art and the Art Students League. Among his students was Georgia O’Keeffe, the miniaturist Helen Winslow Durkee, and the painter Molly Luce. Mora also illustrated several books and publications, including Harper’s Weekly, Scribner’s, The Century, and Collier’s, and produced historical drawings in pen and ink, graphite, and etchings as well as monotypes. During World War I Mora volunteered to create propaganda posters, which led him to become a well known muralist as well. He also painted portraits of Andrew Carnegie, Warren G. Harding, and Isadora Duncan. Mora purchased land in Gaylordsville, Connecticut in 1913 which became his favorite spot to paint scenes of everyday life in the countryside. On July 22nd, 1918 his daughter Rosemary, was born, and she became his most prominent subject. In 1924 Mora became a co-founder of the Kent Art Association in Connecticut, and the late 20s were spent in Argentina and California exhibiting his work. In 1931 Sonia died suddenly of food poisoning, and a year later he married a former portrait sitter and wealthy widow, May Safford. Although he continued to exhibit, he won no further medals and few, if any, of his easel paintings were sold as the Great Depression dragged on. His last decade was filled with personal and financial tragedies, and he died on June 5th, 1940 in his wife’s apartment in New York, leaving behind a legacy of modern American interpretations of Spanish Old Master techniques that was virtually forgotten until new scholarly appreciation began to surface in the early 2000s. Mora’s works are now on display in numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Condition
Commensurate with age.
