The Lemos, (aka de Lemos) family were quite famous in the art world. Pedro and his brother John were both well respected. Pedro was director of the Stanford University Museum and John was involved with the Palo Alto, Calif., school district.

John’s wife Miriam was a noted artist as well. Miriam contributed her talents to the Latham mission in many ways. She illustrated the Latham publications, such as The Kind Deeds Messenger.

The de Lemos family founded and operated the Latham International Poster Contest (1925 – 1964). The contest entries were shipped to The Latham Foundation Poster Contest, C/O Mr. de Lemos, Stanford University. During the 1930s we received over 5,000 entries each year and sponsored more than 30 traveling exhibits. In 1954, we received over 15,000 entries and sponsored more than 60 traveling exhibits. In 1959 we received and judged more than 29,000 entries from 22 countries.

The publicity documents about the contest announced both the winners of the prior year and the theme for the New Year.  You can see several of these historical documents by clicking here.

We do not know the ultimate status of many of the posters because we sent out the vast majority of them for traveling exhibits. Some years ago a university contacted us to say they found a box of posters with our name on it in their basement. That box was returned to us and still had the Railway Express Agency (REA) stickers on it. REA was the UPS/FedEx of the day.

View Poster Gallery

John and Miriam’s son, Don de Lemos shared a bit about the family project explaining how it took over their home for several months. The many new boxes of posters would arrive and have to be processed. The de Lemoses kept track of all these entries and packaged them into traveling exhibits to encourage the Latham message of humane education around the country.