This following biography was researched, compiled, and written by  Geoffrey K. Fleming, Director and CEO, Reading Public Museum, Reading, PA.

IDA LAURETTA GEYLER (December 17, 1905 – May 21, 2005)

A.K.A. “Ida L. Geyler,” “Ida G. Tollenger”

Painter in oil, watercolorist, illustrator, printmaker, craftsperson, educator. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of Ida Marie Sempsrott (1875 – 1957) and Louis Geyler (1877 – 1951). She was raised in Cincinnati, where her father worked as a pattern maker for a brass factory.

Geyler was a member of and served on the boards of a number of local art groups in Cincinnati. By 1939 she was serving as president of the Cincinnati Woman’s Art Club and in 1940 she served on the executive committee for the American Art for the American Home exhibition, which was to be held at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. By the early 1940s Geyler was an officer of the Cincinnati Association of Professional Artists, where she exhibited regularly.

Ida Geyler left Cincinnati for New York sometime in the early-to-mid-1940s, where she met her future husband, William F. Tollenger (1905 – 1994). A narcotics agenda from Brooklyn, New York, they married in 1946 and not long after were off to Japan, where he was assigned as chief narcotics agent to General MacArthur’s administration. During her time there she took up watercolor painting and in 1950 her work was accepted for the Nitten Exhibition at the Metropolitan Ueno National Art Gallery in Ueno Park, Japan. Her works were also shown in Bangkok, Thailand, perhaps during this same period. Following her return to America, Geyler’s paintings of Japan were exhibited in a 1952 solo at Cincinnati’s Closson Gallery.

Ida Geyler’s works are currently known to be in the following public collections: University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH. Her works also reside in private collections throughout the United States.