Jo Mora of Pebble Beach

(Photo: Sacophagus of Father Serra sculpted by Jo Mora and unveiled in 1924 at the Carmel mission. Photo by J.D. Warrick. used under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd/2.0 license with approval of the photographer.)





Jo Mora's art can be seen in many places here, from his marble sculpture of Father Serra's body lying in state at the Carmel Mission to the 23 plaster and concrete heads of historic figures that rim the Monterey County Courthouse in Salinas. You don't have to wander far – maybe the Mora collection at the Monterey Museum of Art or the Harrison Memorial Library in Carmel – to learn that he was a versatile and prolific artist prized for his illustrated books, colorful posters, oil paintings, watercolors, and photographs, as well as his sculptures. His fanciful maps of Pebble Beach and Carmel, which sold for 50 cents in the 1930s, can today bring more than $1,000. Mora's legacy includes a collection in the Smithsonian. Born in Uruguay, he moved to the West in the early 20th century and ended up in Pebble Beach, where he spent 25 productive years before dying in 1947 at the age of 70.

Carmel as an Artist Colony

Carmel's beginnings as an artist's colony can be traced to the arrival in June, 1905 of a talented San Francisco poet named George Sterling (1869-1926), friend of Jack London and protégé of Ambrose Bierce. Sterling and his wife Carrie wanted to live cheaply and healthfully, so they used several acres of land to raise vegetables, chickens and rabbits, and dined often on the freshest of seafood. Sterling also wished to avoid the constant romantic temptations of city life. (He famously described San Francisco as a "cool, grey city of love.") The Sterlings were soon followed to Carmel-by-the-Sea by photographer Arnold Genthe and novelist Mary Austin.

(Photo: Sterling in 1907, in the public domain.)