F. Luis Mora (1874‱940) was America’s first Hispanic master, who earned many awards and was elected a member of 15 prestigious art societies. “F. Luis Mora and the Expression of Beauty” is the first comprehensive museum exhibition of this important artist since 1927 and assembles the best works representing his long and successful career. It is on view through February 7 at the Mattatuck Museum.
The exhibition surveys the whole of Mora’s oeuvre through approximately 40 paintings, murals, drawings and preparatory studies, beginning with skilled watercolors produced at age 13. The exhibition is organized by Mattatuck Museum curator Cynthia Roznoy, PhD, and Lynne Pauls Baron, author of F. Luis Mora: America’s First Hispanic Master, 341 pages and lavishly illustrated, published by Falk Art Reference in 2008. Baron’s monograph is the exhibition catalog, and contains the images of the works exhibited, a comprehensive chronology and exhibition record.
F. (Francis) Luis Mora was born in Uruguay into an artistic family who immigrated to the United States when he was 6 years old in 1880. His father was the highly-trained Catalan architectural sculptor, Domingo Mora (1840‱911), and his mother was Laura Gaillard (1849‱935), a cultured woman who was born in Bordeaux, France. His brother was Jo (Joseph Jacinto) Mora (1876‱947), who became an early California artist. The Mora family was closely related to the ancestral Bacardi family, famous for its rum.
Mora studied at the Boston Museum School with Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson, where he won his first medal, and at the Art Students League with H. Siddons Mowbray. In 1896, when Mora was just 22 years old, William Merritt Chase asked him to be an instructor at his newly formed Chase School of Art in Manhattan.
In 1899, Chase recommended Mora for a mural commission outside of Boston in the stately Lynn, Mass., library †it was a great success and remains on view today. In 1901, Mora won The Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design, and in 1906 he became its first Hispanic member. His works are held by 35 public institutions in the United States and Canada, and several are in the exhibition.
Mora produced an impressive oeuvre following his artistic philosophy, “the expression of beauty,” which he wrote many times in his diaries. In 1910, he wrote, “Art is the whispering of the great voice of nature.” He was a figurative painter who saw beauty in the human form and human character and his skills at portraying a sitter’s inner qualities and personality led him to become a sought-after portraitist.
One of Mora’s major goals was to bring the techniques of the Spanish Old Masters into his modern American painting. This exhibition includes both Mora’s Spanish and American themed works. He traveled to Spain at least five times, and many of the works inspired by his travels are exhibited, including “The Fortune Teller,” 1905, (Butler Institute of American Art) that won a gold medal at the Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco in 1915.
Naturalized an American citizen in 1903, Mora became intensely patriotic. During World War I, he was chosen to paint motivational posters for The Liberty Loan Board, and several of the original studies for the posters, including “Our Answer to Flanders Fields,” is on view.
The exhibition also features works in private collections that have never been exhibited before: portraits of Mora’s family, Ashcan scenes painted in his New York studio, marinescapes painted in his studio alongside the Raritan Bay in New Jersey and garden scenes from his country home in Gaylordsville, Conn.
The museum is at 144 West Main Street. For information, www.Mattatuckmuseum.org or 203-753-0381.
