Lowell Nesbitt; Painted Art for Postage Stamps

Lowell Nesbitt, 59, realistic painter whose pictures of flowers appeared on U.S. postage stamps. The New York artist was commissioned to do the flowers in the 1970s and later commissioned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to do paintings commemorating the Apollo 9 and Apollo 13 space launches. In 1991, the versatile artist sculpted five brawny Rodin-like male mannequins for Pucci International to display contemporary men’s clothes. His modernistic glass prism house, which he called “Falling Rock,” was a marvel of solar energy featured in Architectural Digest and other publications. Nesbitt said he was inspired to paint when he worked as a night watchman in the 1950s at the prestigious Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He had willed the gallery $1.5 million, but withdrew the bequest in 1989 to protest the Corcoran’s refusal to display controversial photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. On Wednesday in New York of unknown causes.