FRANCIS LUIS MORA (1874 1940) My Assistant Gardener

Sale 2678 - Lot 72

Price Realized: $ 5,000

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500

FRANCIS LUIS MORA (1874-1940)
My Assistant Gardener.

Watercolor and pencil on wove paper, 1920. 506x352 mm; 19⅞x13⅞ inches. Signed in ink lower right.

Provenance
The Macbeth Gallery, New York.
Private collection, New York.

Exhibited
"An American Summer in Water Colors by F. Luis Mora, N.A." The Macbeth Gallery, New York, February 9-28, 1921, number 23 (illustrated as the frontispiece).
"Nineteenth Annual Philadelphia Water Color Exhibition," The Philadelphia Water Color Club, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, November 6-December 11, 1921, number 917 (illustrated).

Literature
"Water Colors at the Pennsylvania Academy," Arts & Decoration, December 1921, volume xvi, number 2, page 99 (as September Bouquet, illustrated).
L. P. Baron, F. Luis Mora, America's First Hispanic Master, Falk Art Reference and Baron Art Estate Managers, Madison, Connecticut, 2008, page 243, number 9.30 (illustrated).

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Additional Details

A portrait of the artist's daughter, Rosemary Mora. Rosemary was born in 1918 and was a frequent subject of Mora's paintings.

Mora was a Uruguayan-born American figural painter. His family left Uruguay during an insurgency in 1877 and went to Catalonia, Spain, from where they soon relocated to New York. In 1880, they moved to Perth Amboy, New Jersey. 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. He continued his studies at the Art Students League, New York, and during the late 1890's was working as an illustrator. In 1896 he visited Barcelona and Madrid, where at the Museo Nacional del Prado, he coincidentally met the American artist William Merritt Chase and the two spent significant time absorbing and copying the work of Diego Velázquez and other Spanish Old Masters. Back in the United States in the early 1900s Mora's career blossomed owing to his ability to translate the style of the Spanish masters to American modernist trends; he worked frequently as both an easel painter and muralist.