Jo Mora: the cowboy who put a prospector and a grizzly on a half dollar

Joseph Jacinto Mora was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on October 22, 1876 — about as far from the American West as a person could start. He grew up to be called the "Renaissance Man of the West," and the title was not a stretch. He was a working cowhand, a photographer, a cartoonist, a muralist, a sculptor, a mapmaker, and an author — often all in the same decade.

Art was the family trade. His father, Domingo Mora, was a Catalan sculptor; his mother, Laura Gaillard, came from Bordeaux; his older brother, F. Luis Mora, became the first Hispanic member of the National Academy of Design. The family fled Uruguay during an 1877 uprising, passed through Catalonia, and reached New York in 1880 before settling in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Young Jo trained at the Art Students League of New York and the Cowles Art School in Boston — studying under the painter William Merritt Chase — then paid the bills drawing cartoons for the Boston Evening Traveller and the Boston Herald.

But drawing the West from a Boston desk was never going to be enough. In the early 1900s Mora went and lived it. He worked cattle in Texas and Mexico, then learned ranch horsemanship near Solvang, California, and ever after called himself both an artist and a vaquero — a Spanish-tradition cowboy.

The years that shaped Mora most were spent on a mesa, not a movie set. From about 1904 to 1906 he lived among the Hopi in northeastern Arizona — riding, sketching their katsina costumes, and photographing the Snake and Buffalo dances few outsiders ever saw. He learned the language. He was accepted far enough into the community to undergo an initiation, and was given a Hopi name, Nalje. He filled journals with what he saw.

That immersion is the secret ingredient in everything after it. Mora's West was not a painter's fantasy of the frontier; it was a place he had ridden through, photographed, and been adopted into. When he later carved a prospector or drew a map of cattle country, he was working from memory, not imagination — and it shows in how unforced and specific his figures feel. (His Arizona photographs were good enough that the Smithsonian exhibited them decades later, in 1979.)

Mora's gift was breadth and warmth. He sculpted the bronze-and-travertine cenotaph for Father Junípero Serra at Mission Carmel and the Cervantes monument in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park; he carved the bas-reliefs for the Monterey County Courthouse under a 1930s federal works program; he built enormous, crowded dioramas — one of Portolá's discovery of San Francisco Bay ran nearly a hundred feet, with 64 human figures and more than 200 animals. He drew the dense, witty pictorial maps — he called them cartes — that he is still famous for, packed with cowboys, cattle brands, and tall tales. Whatever the medium, his work was narrative and a little tongue-in-cheek.

Coins were not his usual stage, which made 1925 a test. To mark California's 75th year of statehood — the "diamond jubilee" — a San Francisco citizens' committee chaired by future mayor Angelo Rossi picked Mora unanimously, believing he alone could catch the spirit of the thing. He gave them two plain, powerful images. The obverse — the heads side — shows a Gold Rush prospector kneeling to pan for placer gold, the loose flakes miners washed from streambeds. The reverse — the tails side — carries a grizzly bear walking left, lifted straight from California's Bear Flag. Mora deliberately left the fields — the flat background areas — rough and unpolished, so the figures read against texture instead of mirror.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts hated it. Its sculptor-member, James Earle Fraser — the man who designed the Buffalo nickel — wrote that "the bear is entirely too short, and the whole thing inexperienced and amateurish," and pushed to hand the job to a more established sculptor. The committee refused to drop Mora, citing time and cost, and the design was approved. History sided with the committee: Mora's two-figure half dollar is now widely judged one of the most successful classic commemoratives, and the very directness Fraser distrusted is exactly what collectors prize.