Bio & Resumé

March 27, 1917 - November 9, 2006

MA Inst. Fine Arts, NYU, 1940; attended Art Students League, NY. Soldier Artist-Journalist with Stars and Stripes, Italy WW II 1941-45. Taught painting and art history until, forsaking teaching, became a full time picture-maker in 1949.

Illustrator and cover artist of scientific, genre, landscape and historical subjects for Scientific American, Saturday Evening Post, Life, Sports Illustrated, Field & Stream, Atlantic, Colliers, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, National Geographic and New American Library for pocket book covers.

First, and still pre-eminent painter of gamefish in the water. Began diving Jersey Coast 1922 and, after forty years diving with striped bass, bluefish and tautog holder of divers’ records for striped bass (65 lbs,) bluefish (21½ lbs.).

Started painting fish underwater 1960 for Sports Illustrated , National Geographic and Field & Stream. Dove with all the species of billfish world wide for pictorial series on sailfish, blue marlin, white marlin,striped marlin, black marlin and swordfish. Decades on the Bahamian flats with bonefish, permit, sharks and rays. Years in the Virgin Islands and Belize for tarpon, jewfish, turtles, dolphin fish, and sharks. Spent two summers diving wih bluefin tuna in Nova Scotia and the Straits of Florida. First to see and publish sleeping Sharks, Underwater Naturalist,4(2).

Awards:
Society of Ilustrators Hall of Fame, award of excellence, Society of Animal Artists.
Conservation prints and stamp for Izaak Walton League (Striped Bass); Gulf Coast Conservation Assoc. (Sailfish).
Works in collections of National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C, Lee Yawkey Woodson Museum, Genesee Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art, and numerous private collections.

Chapters about the fishpainter, his seas, fish and landscapes:
In C. Hume, From the Wild, Portfolios of America’s Finest Wildlife Artists, intro. by David Lank (1988); Patricia Van Gelder, Wildlife Artists at Work, 1982 and Robin D’Arcy Shillcock Pintores de la Naturaleza (1997) Spain;

Work Illustrated in:
Stephen Jay and Alice Carter The Art of the National Geographic; a century of illustration (1999); The Best of Sports Illustrated, 1971; Art in Science; I and II, Scientific American 1956, 1960.; Greta Berman and Jeffrey Jeffrey Realism and Realities, The Other side of American Painting (1982); Philip S. Foner and Reinhard The Other America; Art and the Labor movement in the United States; The Society of Illustrators Annuals of American Illustration; nos. 20, 21, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 37, 41; Walt and Roger Reed, The Illustrator in America, 1880 -1980; and the second edition The Illustrator in America, 1860-2000; Vincent Di Fate, Vincent, Infinite Worlds The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art.

Articles about work in:
Wildlife Art, (1990, 2001); Southwest Art, (1980); Gray's Journal (Winter 1979, several from 1975 on); American Artist May(1956) (landscapes); Smithsonian (1993); Field & Stream (1988,1993); Marlin (1997); Salt Water Fisherman (1998); Sporting Classics (1985), Offshore (2000).

Texts by Stanley Meltzoff:
"Confusing Caribbean Carcharinids" Underwater Naturalist, 17(4), 14-20; "Some Sleeping Sharks", Underwater Naturalist, 4(2).; Saltwater Gamefish, 1980; “Billfish”; Field and Stream (1993); Botticelli, Signorelli and Savonarola; Theologia Poetica and painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano (1989) Eric Mitchell prize 1989 for annual best art historical work;“The Revival of the Brothers Le Nain “ Art Bulletin, 1941; “The Revival of Vermeer”, Marsyas, 1940; “Rhetorics, Semiotics and Linguistics: a Look at the Strolling Actresses of Hogarth”, New Literary History, Spring, 1978; “On the Rhetoric of Vision”, Leonardo, 1970, III.Reviews of books and shows in various periodicals since 1945.

Founder-director of the Meltzoff Reliquarium, a private collection of memorabilia of the technology of painting, article on and pictured in the Smithsonian Magazine, Dec. 1993.

Magazine Fish Series:
Sports Illustrated.
Field and Stream
National Geographic

People and history:
Historical series in Life; National Geographic; and Science Fiction cover titles.