Lewis Iselin was born in 1913. He attended Harvard University and studied in the 1930s at the Art Students League in New York with Mahonri Young, John Steuart Curry, George Bridgeman, and Gleb Derujinsky.

Lewis Iselin exhibited work at the National Academy of Design, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. He had one-artist shows with the Maynard Walker Gallery and the Richard Larcada Gallery, New York, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (five of them); at the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Ohio, in 1971; at the Kingpitcher Gallery, Pittsburgh, in 1973; the Plaza Gallery, Denver National Bank, in 1975; and at the University of Maine, Orano, 1975. In the 1980s his work was shown by Hobe Sound Galleries North, Brunswick, ME; the Maine Coast Artists, Rockport; the Portland (ME) School of Art; and the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME.

Lewis Iselin's major works were commissions and included memorial sculpture at the U.S. Cemetery in Suresnes, France, including two friezes of soldiers and the large marble figure Memory; the heroic sculpture of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia; the Thayer Memorial at St. Mark's School, Southboro, Massachusetts; the heroic statue Drama at Gen. George Wingate Memorial High School, New York; the heroic statue St. Vincent de Paul at the St. Vincent de Paul Astor Home in Rhinebeck, NY; a bronze Eagle executed for the Whitney Museum of Art for the façade of its West 54^th Street location, NY (later removed to the Court of Custom Appeals, Washington, DC); heroic portraits of John Wanamaker and Marshall Field at the Merchandise Mart, Chicago; and The Face of Our Time at the Midland Building, Columbus, Ohio. He executed many portraits and allegorical sculptures in private collections and several lesser memorials.

Lewis Iselin was awarded the Helen Barnett Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1938 for his Norse Sea Goddess (now at the University of Maine Art Museum, Bangor). He was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; a trustee of the American Academy in Rome; a trustee of the William A. Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME; trustee of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York City; and trustee emeritus of the Saint Gaudens Memorial, Cornish, NH.

Lewis Iselin's work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; Yale University, New Haven, CT; the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, OH; University of Maine Art Museum, Bangor; Portland (ME) Museum of Art; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Dyersburg State Community College, TN; Colby College, Waterville, ME; and Bates College, Lewiston, ME. The contents of his studio were bequeathed by his widow, Sally Iselin, to St. Mark’s School, Southborough, MA.

Lewis Iselin died in August 1990 in Camden, Maine, his principal residence since 1970. A good 1969 interview is online at the website of the Archives of American Art), which also has his archive. From 1941 to 1945 he served in the U.S. Navy (Legion of Merit, Combat), achieving the rank of Lieutenant Commander of the Destroyer Escort Atherton, which was responsible for sinking the last German submarine sunk in World War II, of Point Judith, RI. At http://ussathertonde169.com see “Barth, “Life Aboard,” for a portrait of Iselin as captain.