Residence in Sunset District is a lithograph created in 1940 by the American artist Jennie Lewis (1892-1944). It is pencil signed and titled. Residence in Sunset District was published by the WPA California Federal Art Project and was printed by Ray Bertrand in an edition of about 25 proofs on Warren's Oldestyle watermarked wove paper. Residence in Sunset District is listed under Lewis 21 on the Newark Museum’s Allocation Control cards for this artist and an impression is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The image measures 8 x 12-3/4 inches.
Jennie Lewis captures the quiet, broad streets of the Sunset District of San Francisco in her lithograph Residence in Sunset District. Markedly different from the rest of the city, with its famed hills and valleys, the low-lying neighborhood of this district was long considered a sleepy outlier to the bustling metropolis, featuring modest houses whose yards at the far west edge abutted ever-shifting sand dunes of Ocean Beach. When Lewis worked for the WPA she often turned her lens on the neighborhoods of San Francisco. In the late 1930s, the city was still sparsely populated, and its affordable housing was an attraction to immigrants, artists, and university students. Today, though it has become more developed and populous, the Sunset District retains much of its quietude owing to the peaceful seaside location.
Jennie Lewis, painter and printmaker, was born in San Diego, California in 1892. Her family moved to San Francisco about 1900. She studied with William Merritt Chase at his summer school in Carmel during the summer of 1914, and at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco with Eric Spencer Mackey and Maynard Dixon, and at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California with Xavier Martinez.
Lewis taught art at a convent school in San Francisco and hand colored greeting cards for San Francisco printing firms. She was accepted to work in the WPA California Federal Art Project in September 1938. Between 1938 and 1942, Lewis produced thirty-two lithographs with the WPA printer Ray Bertrand.
Her work was included in the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939. Through the efforts of the Federal Art Project director, Holger Cahill, a solo exhibition of Lewis’ work was mounted at the Museum of Modern Art New York in 1940. Lewis’ work was represented by the Paul Elder Gallery in San Francisco.
Jennie Lewis’ work is represented in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska; the Newark Museum, New Jersey; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; the St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri; and the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Jennie Lewis died on 13 March 1944 after getting lost in a snowstorm while hiking in the Sierra Nevada in Lake Meadows, California. In June 1944, the San Francisco Museum of Art (now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) mounted a solo exhibition of her work.
