Alvin Meyer, watercolor, Ft. Myers.
Alvin Meyer was a Chicago artist and sculptor who built a home on Fort Myers Beach in 1938. Trained at the American Academy in Rome, the Maryland Institute of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Meyer was a student of Paul Manship and a winner of the Prix de Rome. He executed sculptures on a number of Chicago landmarks, including the Board of Trade Building in the downtown Loop area, and the Chicago Daily News Building on Riverside Plaza, one of Chicago’s great public places.
The June 29, 1928 issue of the New York Sun featured Meyer’s sculpture, Moon Fountain, in a New York City garden on East Sixty-Second Street. Meyer created the statuette symbolizing industrial development awarded to the outstanding industrialist of 1950 by the Society of Industrial Realtors. At the society’s 43rd convention on Miami Beach in November, 1950, Thomas J. Watson, president of I.B.M. was the recipient.
Meyer’s Florida watercolors were exhibited at the Fort Myers Historical Museum in 1983. The Fort Myers Beach Observer, August 17, 1983, “Of more than passing interest to beach residents and visitors is the current showing of watercolors at the Fort Myers Historical Museum in Fort Myers. Many depict a glimpse of Florida’s past, especially of the earlier beach area. The creative paintings are the work of the late Alvin W. Meyer who first came here from Chicago in 1938. An architectural sculptor, Alvin Meyer designed among others the Chicago Board of Trade building and the Chicago Daily News Plaza. Oncoming to the beach, he acquired the first property, just south of Garl’s Drugstore, from Barron Collier, an early beach developer. While here, Meyer built a studio-home where he had a combined workshop for paintings and sculpture and taught sculpture to the beach school children. His wife, to whom he was married for 33 years, until his death in 1968, is the internationally known Dr. Edith L. Potter, recent widow of Frank Duryea Deats of Pointe Royale, Fort Myers. On Dr. Potter’s retirement from the staff of Chicago Lying-In Hospital (where her perinatology and neo-natal research and books won her world-wide recognition), the Meyers moved in December, 1967 to Palm Point, off Gladiolus Drive, where the Spanish type home which Meyer designed and built became their permanent home, noted for its gardens with subtropical plants, including orchids and bromeliads, which she continues to maintain. Since most of the current ‘Florida Watercolors’ collection by Meyer reflects the 1940’s period of the beach area and the small towns, buildings and boats where the artist traveled through Southern Florida at that time, it holds much historical interest, depicting the contrasts in life of the pre-developer years.”
Born: 1892, Bartlett, Illinois.
Died: 1968.
Education: American Academy, Rome, Italy; Maryland Institute of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Exhibits: Chicago Galleries Association, 215 North Michigan, Sculpture and Watercolor Sketches, January, 1948; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Fort Myers Historical Museum, August, 1983, Florida watercolors from the 1940’s. Meyer is listed in Who Was Who in American Art, 1964-1975, Peter Falk, 1999.
