FRANCIS LUIS MORA
Portrait of a Woman with a Red Shawl.

Oil on canvas, circa 1930. 812x665 mm; 32x26 inches. Signed in oil, lower left recto.

Provenance: Private collection, Manchester.

Mora (1874-1940) 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, with his mother 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.

Mora was also a successful portraitist who counted Andrew Carnegie among his subjects. He was selected by the Fine Arts Commission to paint a posthumous portrait of President Warren G. Harding, which is now on permanent display in the White House. He painted portraits of society matrons and their children, prominent physicians and attorneys; and around 1915 he painted a series of portraits of actresses and dancers, including Isadora Duncan and Jeanne Cartier.