Meet The Artists

  Hilton Leech had an important influence on the development of art in Sarasota. He came to the city in 1931 to help organize the Ringling School of Art as one…

  In 1937 Anne Luke was a founding member of the Art League of Manatee County and  first president. At the first meeting of the League Luke said, “The essential…

  Ralph McKelvey was a successful insurance man representing Lloyds of London in New York City when the 1929 Wall Street crash forced him to leave the world of business…

  Katharine Merrill originally had a studio in New York City where she taught at the Art Students League and the New York Collegiate School for Girls. A talented painter…

  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…

Benson Bond Moore was born and raised in Washington, D.C. and lived there for seventy years until his retirement to Sarasota. A nationally known artist Moore’s etchings of birds were…

  Franklin Townsend Morgan’s early professional career as a painter was in Philadelphia where he was associated with the Sketch Club, the Print Club, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine…

  In the early 1920’s Natalie Newell’s drawing of the Miami skyline was featured over the Miami Herald’s daily news section, Miami Beach News. The Herald February 1923 commented on…

Carl Nordell, Sarasota, Fort Myers. The Inca Tree, Landscape. Fort Myers 1941. Signed lower right. Inscribed verso, painted on the estate of Thomas A. Edison, Fort Myers, Fla. 30 by…

  In 1926 Elliot O’Hara sold a successful telephone dial manufacturing company and began a career as an artist. He was thirty-five years old and had no training in art.…

  Jean Jacques Pfister was born in 1878 in Basle, Switzerland and immigrated to the United States in 1898. Pfister studied art at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in…