Old Pines at Monterey, Pedro de Lemos, c. 1921
Pedro de LemosAmerican

Old Pines at Monterey

c. 1921 · Print

Can I see it?

Not on view at present

Where is “Old Pines at Monterey” now? Collection: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis. Not on view at present. Checked September 29, 2026.

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Minneapolis, United States

It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.

Checked
In this state since
Source
The museum

About the work

Pedro Lemos was the leading light of the Arts and Crafts movement on the West Coast, extolling the importance of handcrafted objects to beautify our everyday lives. For printmakers, the epitome of this aesthetic was a print made from blocks of wood or linoleum carved and inked by hand. (Lemos used a cornhusk wrapped around cardboard to rub the paper against the inked block.) Favorite Arts and Crafts subjects were highly personal scenes from nature, and windblown trees were about as good as it got.

Read on

In Old Pines at Monterey, we see Lemos the theoretician, using two shades of the same color, as in the row of violet trees, or using complementary shades, like the red and green in the foreground. The power of this print comes just as much from experimentation, however—the iridescence Lemos somehow achieves on the wind-carved trees, the lavender flecks in the blue sky. Lemos worked on the campus of Stanford University near Palo Alto, Calif., and was often seen sketching on the Monterey Peninsula a couple hours away; in 1926 he designed a cottage and had it built in the area. The son of a Portuguese-born cobbler, he decided in 1933 to ally himself with Spanish noblemen with the last name of de Lemos. He went back to earlier prints and squeezed the important-sounding “de” into his signature, as he does here.

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Details

Accession number
2017.64

In the catalog

Sources

All works

On view at Minneapolis Institute of Art

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