Pedro Joseph de Lemos

Pedro Joseph de Lemos (25 May 1882 – 5 December 1954) was an American painter, printmaker, architect, illustrator, writer, lecturer and museum director 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, patron of 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, California.

Pedro's parents had emigrated from the Azores in 1872. His father Francisco (or Frank) was a shoemaker. Pedro was born on 25 May 1882 in Austin, Nevada. The family settled in Oakland, California in 1888. Pedro and his brothers Frank and John all followed careers in art.

As a teenager he studied art intermittently with Harry Stuart Fonda, Emile Gremke, and Mary Benton and at the California School of Design (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He returned to the latter school in 1910-11 and studied under Charles Judson, Harry Seawell, and Alice Chittenden. In 1913 he studied in New York with George Bridgman at the Art Students League and with Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia.

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. Later this became known as the Lemos Brothers Art and Photography Studio, which offered art classes in copper, leather and landscaping as well as the traditional media of drypoint, etching and illustrating.

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