This iteration of the San Francisco Mint was built in 1937, after the original mint proved to be too small. Lewis, in her trademark simplicity, presents the commanding Greek revival facade of the New Mint as the central focus of a familiar city, the famous, hilly San Francisco landscape in the background and a sky suggesting the arrival of fog.
In her relatively short career, Lewis captured a broad swath of her hometown of San Francisco in lithographs and paintings. San Francisco proved to be her muse, with no scene too ordinary or too iconic to be unworthy of her glance. Sand dunes and landlines, a particularly well situated street corner, a patch of garden, the marina, the Golden Gate: everything had a worthy angle according to Lewis.
Indeed, the paired down, stylized look of her work reflects the mode of the contemporary metropolitan city throughout a seminal evolution of art in the United States, from the WPA era, when much of her printmaking was executed, and into the beginning years of mid-century modernism, when, sadly, her career ended with her unexpected death in 1944.
This lithograph was published by the California Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project.