Jane Pinheiro’s Watercolors: A Collection Lost and Re-Found August 5, 2010

This season the Theodore Payne Art Gallery once again is proud to share with you the unique watercolors of Jane Pinheiro.

“The Poppy Lady,” as Pinheiro was called, was well known for her watercolors depicting the flora of the Antelope Valley. She was a self-taught artist and botanist who took great pride in the accuracy of her illustrations, and her work was collected widely.

Born Jane Seymour, Pinheiro was raised in Salt Lake City and lived in Pasadena for years, helping her mother run a boarding house. One of the guests was Joseph Pinheiro, a native of the Azores. He and Jane married in 1930. In 1940 they moved to the Antelope Valley, where Jane became enamored with the desert flora. She was deeply involved in the civic affairs of the Antelope Valley region and instrumental in establishing the California Poppy Reserve. Though she did not survive to see the opening of the visitor center at the Reserve, 163 of her paintings are displayed there each spring.

Upon her passing in 1982, Pinheiro’s family donated dozens of additional paintings to the Foundation, providing a rich body of work for our art program. The original 100 paintings and several of the later acquisitions were large paintings depicting species in a natural landscape setting. Most of her later works were smaller unfinished studies and drawings.