Beschreibung:

MORA, F[RANCIS]. LUIS Sketchbook containing drawings in a variety of media ; pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor, one watercolor signed (F. Luis Mora and dated 11/4 [18]84 and one pencil sketch similarly signed and dated [18]91. Original cloth. 8 x 10 5/8 (20 x 27 cm); 19 ff., generally with sketches on both sides of the leaf, one sketch mounted to each pastedown and several small pieces laid in. Endpapers replaced, a few leaves frayed. Mora's family fled Uruguay in 1878, three years after his birth in 1874. A precocious talent, by the age of fifteen Mora was enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he studied under Edmund Charles Tarbell and Frank Weston Benson both American Impressionists; later he taught illustration and life classes at William Merritt Chase's Chase School of Art, counting among his pupils Georgia O'Keeffe He was probably the first Hispanic member of the National Academy of Design, which he joined in 1906, and he became a successful portraitist; among his subjects was Andrew Carnegie. He had additional success as a muralist and illustrator. His gallerists included William Macbeth, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Milch. An important biography was recently published by Lynne Pauls Baron, who calls him "America's first Hispanic master." While these are relatively juvenile works, they are frequently quite accomplished, some done during his period of study in Boston. One of especial interest depicts P.T. Barnum's Jumbo running amok and destroying an engine, a crude pen-and-ink sketch (this is fantasy, although Jumbo did in fact die in a railway accident in 1885, and this likely dates from that time); opposite is a wonderfully well accomplished portrait in pencil of a seated child, very sensitively rendered. C