| Lowell Nesbitt | ||
| Birth Date: October 4, 1933 |
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| Death Date: July 8, 1993 Artist Gallery |
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| Mr. Nesbitt, was born in Baltimore, Maryland on Oct. 4, 1933, and was a graduate of the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. He also attended the Royal College of Art in London, where he worked in stained glass and etching. He often said that a stint working as a night watchman at the Phillips Collection in Washington inspired him to paint.
In 1964, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington gave him one of his first museum exhibitions and by the mid-1970's he had decided to leave the museum a bequest of more than $1 million. But in 1989 Mr. Nesbitt publicly revoked the bequest after the Corcoran canceled a disputed exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, who was an old friend. He named the Phillips Collection as a beneficiary instead. Mr. Nesbitt was frequently grouped with the Photo Realists, but his images were more interpretively distorted, somewhat loosely painted and boldly abbreviated. He had many subjects: studio interiors, articles of clothing, piles of shoes, and groupings of fruits and vegetables. He also painted his dog, a Rottweiler named Eric. Despite such variety, Mr. Nesbitt was best known for gargantuan images of irises, roses, lilies, and other flowers, which he often depicted in close-ups so that their petals seemed to fill the canvas. Dramatic, implicitly sexual, and a little ominous, they earned the artist popularity with the general public that tended to overshadow his reputation within the art world.
In 1980 the United States Postal Service issued four stamps based on Mr. Nesbitt's floral paintings. He also served as the official artist for the space flights of Apollo 9 and Apollo 13.
Lowell Nesbitt, a realist painter known for his large-scale images of flowers, died of natural causes.
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