34. F. Luis Mora
(1874-1940)
Mother and Child

(click on image to print)
Mora: Mother and Child

Mother and Child

Etching and drypoint, 124 x 77 mm. A fine, rich impression in brown-black with plate tone on thick, textured wove paper with large margins, signed in pencil. Mora was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, of a Catalonian (Spain) father and a French mother. His father was a noted sculptor. The family left Uruguay during an insurrection, going to Catalonia, but in 1880 they arrived in the United States, eventually settling in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Encouraged in art by his father, and something of a child prodigy, he studied in Boston with Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson and later at the Art Students League. At the age of nineteen he was already doing illustrations for popular magazines. Mora had a successful career – painter, portraitist, illustrator, poster designer, muralist, print maker – until the Great Depression, which put an end to the careers of many fashionable painters. He was more, though, than a fashionable artist; the lucrative portraits aside, he was probably the first Hispanic-American artist and his knowing studies of Spanish art, in Spain and elsewhere, brought a new bloodline into the genealogy of art in America. The subjects of this etching appear to be of native Indian stock, but whether of North or South America is unknown.