Jo Mora: Spokesman for the Old West
Jo Mora (1876-1947) was one of California’s most versatile artists, adept as a painter, sculptor, muralist, jewelry designer, author, actor, photographer, book illustrator, cartoonist, and cartographer. He even designed the ”California Diamond Jubilee” commemorative half dollar in 1925. With rare insight and ever-present wit, he left a remarkable legacy of recorded customs and costumes of Indians and cowboys during our country’s fading frontier. An accomplished draftsman, Jo Mora achieved a stylistic rendering of animals and people which is uniquely his own. The Monterey History and Art Association is indeed fortunate in owning a fabulous collection of Mora books, paintings, sculptures and original drawings. To the latter, recently, have been added four plates of meticulously rendered watercolor studies of clothing which would have been worn by the explorer Portola and his entourage of Indians and Spanish teamsters and friars. These drawings are typical of the studious research which Mora must have done before he began a 1939 diorama of the Portola expedition. They poignantly remind one of the history of that ill-fated diorama. The state of California had commissioned Mora to create a huge study for the California Pavilion at the World’s Fair on Treasure Island. One hundred feet long, the sculptural group contained no less than sixty-four human figures and two hundred and four animals, all done in painted hydrastone, on a scale of two inches to the foot. “By means of changing intensities and combinations of colored lights, Portola and his followers appeared to approach under the pale light of dawn, pass through the hot sun of midday into the flowing colors of the setting sun, which then faded into a cold blue of a moonlit night.” The exhibit was certainly the most spectacular in the pavilion! The plan was, at the close of the two-year-long expedition, to move the panorama into a building to be specially constructed at Sacramento. In June of 1940, the second year, the California Mission Trails Association proposed that after the fair ended, the Mora work should go to Monterey instead. They declared: Eminent educators say that it is the finest work of its kind the world has ever known (so) it is only fitting that it should be placed within the Mission Trails area which was traversed by Portola. Needless to say, Monterey, his destination and home of the sculptor, should be the place for this magnificent work.
The city of Monterey offered to erect a building to house it on the shore of El Estero. Mission Trail boards from all ten counties were urged to petition the Governor. However, before anything was decided, on August 24th a fire reduced to rubble the Treasure Island California Pavilion and its Jo Mora diorama.
Joseph Jacinto Mora, one day to become famous on the shores of the Pacific, was born on October 22, 1876, far away on a shore of the South Atlantic Ocean, at Montevideo, Uruguay He and an older brother, Francis Luis (1874-1940), were the only children of a couple from Catalonia, Spain: the sculptor Domingo Mora and his French wife, Laura Gaillard from Alsace Lorraine. The little boys’ playpen was their father’s studio, where it seemed normal to be modeling clay or scribbling constantly. In 1882 the family moved to Massachusetts, and both Jo and Luis continued to study painting and sculpture with their father before attending the Cowles Art School in Boston and later studying in New York with Chase and at the Art Students League.
Luis remained in New York City except for two different years when he resided in Barcelona, Spain. He became internationally famous for his landscapes and portraits, “translating what he knows best, the spirit of the Spaniard at play.” Indeed, he held a commission from the Spanish government to paint one picture a year to be hung in the Prado Museum. Two of these were life-sized oils of Jo Mora’s children, a son and daughter. Luis frequently visited his brother, becoming well-known on the Monterey Peninsula.
Jo’s career took a different direction, molded by his lifelong, insatiable fascination with “the wild and woolly west.” After a brief stint as an illustrator for the Boston Traveler newspaper and as a cartoonist for the Boston Herald, the eighteen-year-old departed on a rambling tour of Mexico and the Southwest, studying the land and its people and animals, always taking notes, sketching and modeling or carving little sculptures. As he remembered it in an interview in 1931:
It was in the fall of ’94 when I left old San Antonio and struck across the Border. A gun and an Ambition to ride the range constituted my equipment, in addition to a mustang and a command of Castilian acquired from my father. I was free, young, adventure was everywhere, and the lurking dangers of Mexico were a lure … In the Indian villages, I would squat beside an old squaw and watch her fashion grotesque figures in clay, and, much to her delight, the same clay in my hands would turn to Indians, cowboys, horses. On one of his rambles, Frederick Remington stumbled onto some of these rough studies. He was going over the cattle country, looking for color, and took the trouble to look me up. I showed him a number of models that I had at the ranch. “Son,” he said, “You’re doing fine. Just stay with it.” After he left, I started in real earnest. I took possession of a deserted shack back of the ranch house, and after dispossessing the tarantulas and scorpions, I worked at my clay whenever fortunate enough to have a day or so at headquarters. Cowboys gaped and joked and handed out cryptic bits of valuable criticism. Indians looked on and granted approval or disapproval, while model after model was destroyed because it did not please me or some of my numerous critics.
It is of interest that (like other artists such as Remington, Russell, Paxson, Borein, Joe De Yong, Maynard Dixon) Jo Mora worked as a cowhand, learning firsthand about the accouterments of horses and the dress of the American cowboy; knowing from experience the contortions a riata can make; absorbing the milieu or ranching in minute detail so that later his artwork would glow with that indefinable quality which comes only from authority.
Mora and his horse made a pasear of the Mexican plateau country, “from the Rio Grande to Tierra Caliente,” he recorded. For his return from Mexico, the youth switched to a train from Monterrey bound for San Antonio. Conversation with strangers resulted in a job offer to join an outfit driving a caballada of some 500 horses from the border far into Texas. Jo Mora was still working as a cowpuncher in Texas in August of 1898 (“right after the end of the ”Spanish-American Was’). Shortly after, he traveled to New Mexico, where he lost his heart to the colorful Indians and their even more spectacular deserts. However, Jo couldn’t remain long, for he was running out of money. He returned east to earn a “grubstake” necessary for another visit to his beloved west.
That “grubstake” took form as a contract with the Boston publishing house of Dana Estes Co., to re-write and illustrate such old classics as Reynard the Fox (which appeared in 1901) and Anderson’s Fairytales (the next year); together with an illustrated version of Laura E. Richard’s Hurdy-Gurdy. In 1903 the Boston Sun Herald ran Mora’s cartoons called “Animaldom,” and the Estes firm published a “1903 Illustrated Animal Football Calendar” (probably a forerunner of his popular animated maps).
Apparently, it was during this time that Jo Mora taught himself the art of photography, for when he went west early in 1903, his “grubstake” contained one of Kodak’s newly-perfected, portable, collapsible box cameras. It was to be used constantly on all his future peregrinations.
Jo made his first trip to California to visit his parents, who had moved to San Jose. He did not remain there long. That summer, he drifted down to the Donahue ranch on the Santa Inez River near Solvang, where he was hired as a cowhand, although the local men looked askance at his attire of Texas “wing chaps.” The nearby mission of Santa Inez intrigued him with its dolorous beauty, slumbering in neglect; Jo decided to visit the chain of all the missions, beginning over the border in Sonora. Trailing a pack train, he spent the remainder of the summer exploring that land of the conquistadors, returning to the Santa Inez ranch via Capistrano Mission, where he felt completely spellbound. In August, Mora was back in San Jose and joined a winter tour of the country around the Yuba and Feather Rivers. The party was organized by a San Jose friend of Jo’s, a mining engineer who was knowledgeable about the lore of the Bret Harte area, and who also impressed the artist by pointing out the environmental desolation being wreaked by the placer mining. At about this time, this same friend introduced Jo Mora to a San Jose girl, Grace Alma Needham, daughter of a local pioneer family. The couple soon began a lengthy – and lively – correspondence.
[To Be Continued in Next Issue]
