George Joseph Koch {variant spelling Kotch}(1884 - 1951) The son of a German-born bookbinder father and an American mother, George Koch was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. By the age of 16, Koch was officially listing his occupation as “artist, designer.” His natural talents were well-cultivated from early training in New York City at the National Academy of Design and The Cooper Union, an art, architecture and engineering college. With these credentials in hand, he studied for four years at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, Germany where he earned a solo exhibition in that city’s Glass Palace. By 1910 he was back in the United States, teaching drawing and earning a living as a successful illustrator and landscape painter. He married Harriet B. Brockway in 1913. The following year he traveled to San Francisco to paint murals at the Panama Pacific International Exposition. While on the West Coast, he visited the Monterey Peninsula. The year 1915 was the start of a bi-coastal lifestyle, moving back and forth between Carmel and New York City as well as Mystic, Connecticut, maintaining studios in both East Coast locations. Due to anti-German sentiment in the U.S. during World War l, Koch used a variant spelling of his last name, Kotch, but evidence indicates that he continued to use his original family name too, throughout his career. Koch’s 1922 solo exhibition of twenty-five paintings of Monterey Peninsula scenes at the Babcock Gallery in New York City was said to show “a well-developed color sense and dramatic vigor in his brushstrokes.” Returning to the Monterey Peninsula for good in 1916, George and Harriet became active in the arts community, and with their daughter, moved to Robles del Rio in Carmel Valley where they built a spacious studio onto their new home. In 1927 Koch was one of the 18 “founders” of the Carmel Art Association and served as Director for the first two years. CAA was Koch’s longest professional gallery relationship. Two close friendships developed between Koch and two early juried Artist Members: George Seideneck and Ralph D. Miller. In the summer of 1932 the Pine Cone newspaper made the dramatic announcement that Koch had given up fine art painting to make easy money by selling real estate in the Carmel Valley. He constructed several houses in the Robles del Rio, but his retirement was temporary. He contributed large-scale landscapes and seascapes in oil (he was known for high horizon lines) as well as watercolors, temperas, and gouaches to the Carmel Art Association’s monthly exhibitions until 1950, save for two and a half years, after a critical review in a local newspaper. He was known for placing high horizon lines on his canvases. In July of 1938 he joined several CAA Artist Members to rebuild the floors at the CAA. The exhibition of Koch’s work outside of Carmel is slight. These include the State-wide Annual Exhibits of the Santa Cruz Art League, the Salinas Women’s Club, Monterey County Fair, California State Fair, the Carmel Artists at the Stanford University Art Gallery, Graves Gallery in San Francisco, Annual Exhibitions of the “Society for Sanity in Art” at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and a canvas entitled The Berkshires, shown in the California Building at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in 1939. George Joseph Koch died in a Monterey hospital on September 13, 1951, following a long period of failing health.