FRANCIS LUIS MORA (1874 1940) Portrait of Mrs F Luis Mora

Sale 2678 - Lot 25

Price Realized: $ 3,500

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

Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000

FRANCIS LUIS MORA (1874-1940)
Portrait of Mrs. F. Luis Mora.

Oil on canvas, circa 1912. 382x385 mm; 15x18⅛ inches.

Provenance
Private collection, New York.
Exhibited
"Inaugural Exhibition," The Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York, October 8-29, 1913, number 94 (illustrated).

Note
Portrait of Mrs. F. Luis Mora was trimmed from its original composition, a full-length portrait, by an unknown hand after 1913. The full composition was reproduced for the 1913 "Inaugural Exhibition" at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester.

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Additional Details

Francis Luis Mora married Sophia "Sonia" Brown Compton in September 1900 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Mora frequently painted Sophia from their meeting in 1881 at school, until her death in 1931 when Mora buried several of her portraits. Some of these portraits were monumental in size, including the present lot in its untrimmed state. Aside from the 1913 "Inaugural Exhibition" at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, the present lot may have also been exhibited at the National Academy of Design in the "88th Annual Exhibition" in the spring of 1913 (catalogue number 27).

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 1890s 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 1900's 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.