EARLY LIFE
1912
Born Leonard Louis Nelson in Camden, New Jersey, on March 5. He lived in his family home at 1103 Broadway. His mother was Anna (nee Bryen) and his father, Morris Nelson

During grade school the family resided at 1514 Bradley Avenue, Camden. Their father raised gamecocks, and Leonard had a pony and cart. His father owned three retail stores: a furniture store at 1103 Broadway, and jewelry and dress stores just next door on Broadway.

Anna Nelson died in 1928 at age 40. Six weeks later their father also died, at age 42, of a heart attack. Leonard was 14 at the time. The three children lived on their trust fund and occupied a succession of homes owned by the estate. It is believed that the bank exhausted the children's assets to cover its own institutional losses in the financial crash of 1929.

In 1932 Nelson joined a friend, Ira Franklin, who was on his way to attend Auburn University in Alabama. He enrolled in classes, played polo, and joined the ROTC. He attended classes for a short time only. He later returned to Camden. Before settling on a lifelong involvement with the visual arts, he flirted for a few years with the theatre but found the role of actor too limiting creatively.

In autumn 1936, without a portfolio or any formal experience in painting or drawing, he talked himself into a half-year scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on very unusual terms. He agreed to a stipulation that at the end of the first term the faculty would vote to extend his scholarship, but if he was not doing passing work, he would leave and take a job to repay his tuition in full. He was accepted, and he soon flourished at the academy where his primary mentor was Henry McCarter, then an instructor in a course called Understanding Art and Modern Painting. Nelson received a Cresson Traveling Fellowship in 1939.

He spent six weeks in Europe on his Cresson Fellowship visiting Poland, Estonia, Latvia, the Netherlands, France, and Italy.

He returned to the academy for another year and also took classes at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, PA, from 1939-1941, where he met and became quite friendly with Dr. Barnes and Bertrand Russell, a frequent visitor.

Nelson lived at 1720 Sansom Street in Philadelphia in a second floor walkup. An artist named Joe Presser had the spacious third floor studio above him. When Presser moved out, Nelson took the studio, and he remained there until his marriage to Alma Neas in 1963.