Pedro Joseph de Lemos

Pedro Joseph de Lemos (25 May 1882 – 5 December 1954) was an American painter, printmaker, architect, illustrator, writer, lecturer, museum director and art educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to about 1930 he used the simpler name Pedro Lemos or Pedro J. Lemos; between 1931 and 1933 he changed the family name to de Lemos, believing that he was related to the Count de Lemos (1576–1622), patron of Miguel de Cervantes. Much of his work was influenced by traditional Japanese woodblock printing and the Arts and Crafts Movement. He became prominent in the field of art education, and he designed several unusual buildings in Palo Alto and Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.

Early life and education Pedro was born on 25 May 1882 in Austin, Nevada. The family settled on Myrtle Street in Oakland, California in 1888.

He attended public schools and, as a teenager he studied art the Mark Hopkins Institute (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in San Francisco with Harry Stuart Fonda (1864–1942), Emile Gremke, and Mary Frances Benton. He returned to the latter school in 1910-11 and studied under Charles Chapel Judson (1864-1946), Harry Seawell, and Alice Brown Chittenden (1859–1944). In 1913 he studied in New York with George Bridgman at the Art Students League of New York and with Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University in New York City.

Early career

He was employed by Pacific Press Publishing Company in Oakland from 1900 to 1904. In 1904 he and his brother John started an engraving firm in San Francisco, which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. In 1907 he married Reta Bailey of Berkeley and the three brothers, with two additional partners, started Lemos Illustrating Company in Oakland, continuing as Lemos Brothers, Artists and Engravers to 1911.

Museum director Under pressure to incorporate modernist art trends like cubism in the curriculum of the San Francisco Institute of Art, he resigned in the fall of 1917 to become director of the art museum and gallery at Stanford University. He wrote Correlated art for advanced schools, books 1-3, that were published by Abbott Educational Co. on March 26, 1927.

Architecture

In 1922, there had been an old oak tree in Palo Alto that was cut down, de Lemos was upset by the cutting of this old tree and in reaction he bought up a parcel of land on Ramona Street (near University Avenue) in order to save the oak trees. Between the 1920s until the late 1930s, de Lemos designed and built multiple buildings in Palo Alto, California including 520-526 Ramona Street and across the street at 533-539 Ramona Street, 460 Churchill Avenue (built in 1925) in order to house his art studio, and four Medieval Revival houses at 1550-1560-1566-1579 Cowper Street (built in the 1930s). He and his wife had already engaged in developing similar groups of art studios and shops in Carmel and Palo Alto.

Between 1931 and 1941 de Lemos developed his own home with nearly 9,000 square feet on Waverley Oaks in Palo Alto, the Pedro de Lemos House (or Hacienda de Lemos, Waverley Oaks) is Spanish Colonial Revival architecture and is on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979.

In 1944, Lemos began work on a "Storybook" house in Pebble Beach, known as the “Gingerbread House” or “Casita de Lemos” (Little house of Lemos). The cottage was a guest house for a larger home planned for the property. He completed only the garage and poured concrete roof.

Death Lemos died 5 December 1954, in his home in Palo Alto, California at the age of 72.

Associations In August 1927, de Lemos was elected the first president of the Carmel Art Association in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, but refused to attend most of the meetings in a bitter dispute over juried exhibitions. He also belonged to the Bohemian Club, Palo Alto Art Association, Chicago Society of Etchers, Pacific Art League, and other organizations. In 1943 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.