Stanley Meltzoff was born in Harlem on March 27, 1917, the eldest son of Nathan and Sadie Marcus Meltzoff. His father, who sang in the Russian Imperial Choir, immigrated to NYC and for over 50 years was the cantor at a major Manhattan synagogue. Stanley’s brother, Julian Meltzoff, a noted psychologist who became a sculptor in his later years, recalled the smell of turpentine in their bedroom where Stanley was always painting. Julian posed for many of Stanley’s dramatic black and white photographs, honing skills later essential to his artistic process.

When WWII broke out, blocking a European art history research trip, Stanley Meltzoff was ABD (All But Doctorate) in Fine Arts at New York University. He ended up on the Stars and Stripes troops’ newspaper in Italy, editing, writing pieces and drawing. Stanley’s favorite war stories involved exploring treasure troves of Renaissance paintings hidden away in palaces, and kissing Botticelli’s Venus, perhaps apocryphal but capturing his lifelong admiration for this artist.

Later in life, he wrote an award-winning art history book on Botticelli. (Meltzoff, Stanley Botticelli, Signorelli and Savonarola : theologia poetica and painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano / Stanley Meltzoff. – Firenze : L. S. Olschki, 1987. – 422 p.) 

After WWII, Stanley Meltzoff married Alice Forder, a New York stage actress during the decade before the war. Once they married, Alice became his muse and major model. When the family moved an hour outside Manhattan to Fair Haven by the Jersey shore in 1955, Stanley Meltzoff designed his new prow-shaped studio with vast skylights and wall-size mirror. They filled the old house with books, wallpapered and decorated it in Victorian antiques, and made a mini-museum of his paintings.

Leaving behind teaching at Pratt and the city, Stanley Meltzoff expanded from paperback book covers of science fiction and romance. He launched into grand historical works for Time/Life, National Geographic, Argosy and Saturday Evening Post. He created 65 Scientific American covers that ingeniously demonstrated scientific advances, and for United Engineer, he composed surreal industrial landscapes, including atomic power plant construction, .

Paintings took a couple of months from conception to completion. Magazines were flourishing through the early 1960s so the illustration market happily covered the cost of such time-consuming masterfully detailed artworks. But by 1964, with the demise of commissions for grand classic paintings illustrating historical events, science and industry, he shifted to his other passion, the underwater realm.

As a child summering on the Jersey shore, Stanley had begun his love affair with the ocean. Moving close to the ocean in the 1950s, he became an early scuba diver in the days when they had to make their own wetsuits and devise tanks. He developed the underwater genre, painting series on different fish species for Sports Illustrated, National Geographic and Field & Stream. In “Bound for Blue Water: Contemporary American Marine Art” (Greenwich Workshop Press, 2003), the gallery owner and marine art historian J. Russell Jinishian called Meltzoff “the father and founder of the genre.”

Stanley Meltzoff’s own classic process applied to grand historical works or vivid underwater scenes, had grown out of his admiration and study of Renaissance art as both art historian and painter. Using time-honored methods to endure for generations, he carefully boiled his own glues to prepare his own canvases stretched on wooden boards. Over decades, his pallet shifted from personally hand-blended oil colors to newly available quality oils then acrylics.

Researching in-depth his human and natural history subjects, Meltzoff conceived and sketched ways to portray interactions that were dramatic, as accurate as possible, yet often surreal, claiming this as the advantage over photography. He wrote and spoke of the rhetoric of vision, and painting as illusion with the power to transcend. A contrarian, he loved to call himself a “picture-maker” rather than an artist, harking back to times before the Art Market game existed.

Besides library research, he took the family on fieldtrips to experience the actual settings and light, from Amish farms and steel mills of Pennsylvania, to burgeoning mid-20^th century industrial construction sites in the wetlands outside New York City, to Saratoga and the Bull Run Civil War battle field outside Washington, D.C. With imagination, he created studies or roughs that then had to be vetted by art editors of the various publications. Sometimes, he would despair at their conventionality but usually he managed to convince them of his vision in the rough.

For each project, Stanley Meltzoff had to hunt for props from Red Bank dealers in the contents of rambling old estates. He built stage sets in his studio, and he rented period clothing at the definitive Eaves Costume Company in Manhattan. Friends and neighbors, spearfishing buddies and relatives, were recruited to model. Certain people appear over and over, including his actress wife Alice, daughters Annie and Sarah, and Stanley, himself, who frequently played at making faces in front of his giant mirror.

Directing his actors, lighting the scenes, he would shoot black and white photographs using Hasselblad, Rolleiflex and other reflex cameras, developing the images in the darkroom wing of his studio. Inspired by the Renaissance camera obscura method, he also projected his photographic images onto canvas as a first outline.

Alice became a social worker once Stanley shifted full-time to fish. She died in 1979, leaving two daughters, Sarah Keene Meltzoff, who became a cultural anthropologist and professor at University of Miami’s marine school and maker of  a surreal Found Art she dubs Cargo Art, and Annie Laurie Armistead, a poet artist and yoga teacher in Davis, California. Stanley continued for nearly 30 more years, never again painting humans, carried deep among the subtle blues of ocean life. Meanwhile, his body of work inspired by history, science and industry is a time machine, carrying us with him as a consummate storyteller, on a journey into realms of curiosity and illusion.