Francis Luis Mora Biography | Oil Paintings

Francis Luis Mora the son of noted sculptor Domingo Mora, and Laura Gaillard, whose two sisters, Ernestina and Gabriella, married into the Bacardi rum family. Mora was close to the Bacardi family all of his life. The family left Uruguay during a revolt in 1877 when they went to Catalonia in Spain, and from there, in 1880, they sailed to New York City.

Francis Luis Mora was a precocious young artist, drawing historical scenes and scenes of his contemporary environs. 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 studied at the Art Students League of New York, under Henry Siddons Mowbray, a year later at the age of nineteen his art education was complete.

In 1896 when he was twenty-two years old, Francis Luis Mora traveled to Europe with his mother, his third trip to Europe. They two first visited family in Barcelona before heading to Madrid, where Mora by coincidence saw William Merritt Chase in the Museo del Prado. It was there, that Mora became inspired by the art of Diego Velázquez and other Spanish Old Masters, Mora practiced and refined his technique by painting copies of Velasquez's artwork.

Francis Luis Mora taught illustration and life classes at both William Merritt Chase's Chase School of Art (later to become Parsons) and the Art Students League. Among his students was Georgia O'Keeffe, who studied with him between 1907 and 1908.

Mora was also a successful portraitist who counted Andrew Carnegie among his subjects. Mora was selected by the Fine Arts Commission to paint a posthumous portrait of President Warren G. Harding, which is on permanent display in the White House.

In 1927, Francis Luis Mora had a solo exhibition in Argentina at the Buenos Aires Museo de Bellas Artes, which received glowing reviews in The New York Times.

Because of the Great Depression, even though he kept on displaying, he won no further awards and hardly any of his oil paintings were selling, he also suffered a dearth of portrait commissions, and his illustrations became few. Mora gradually ran out of money, and in 1939 he rented his Gaylordsville, Connecticut property which he had bought in 1913, to make money.

Francis Luis Mora had numerous solo shows in museums and galleries. He was famous in his lifetime but was quickly forgotten because his works were poorly handled after his death.

Artists Influencing Francis Luis Mora: Diego Velázquez, Edmund Charles Tarbell, Frank Weston Benson, Henry Siddons Mowbray.
He Traveled To Spain, USA, Argentina.
Painters Francis Luis MoraInfluenced: Georgia O'Keeffe.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.