Depicting the celebrated ballet and ice dancer Jeanne Cartier, this lifesize portrait was recently accessed into the SBMA collections after having been abandoned at the Museum for many years. It displays the talent and painterly verve of artist Luis Mora, an unfairly forgotten painter who was one of the most active and influential contemporary artists of his generation.

Born in Uruguay to Spanish parents, Mora immigrated to New Jersey with his family when he was six years old and went on to become one of the most active and influential American artists of his generation. A popular illustrator, teacher (he was invited to teach drawing at what is now the Parsons School of Design), portraitist of presidents and the social elite, as well as an award-winning muralist, Mora was also one of the first Latino artists to be accepted into the National Academy of Design.

This painting is the last of three life-size portraits produced by the artist in 1915 and may have once belonged to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. How the painting came to be owned by a Mrs. Homer Barnes of Santa Barbara is not known. The other two portraits are in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Toledo Museum of Art, where they show Cartier in full theatrical costume and decorous poses, as if captured while performing. By contrast, our portrait is much more intimate; more like a boudoir scene to which we (like the artist) have somewhat illicit access. Mora dwells on the Spanish (perhaps, even Catalan) fringed shawl and the elegance of his sitter’s casual self-possession, even in such informal deshabillé. Even the frame is part of the artist’s original design, as evidenced by the continuation of the patterning of the rug onto the frame itself.