Patricia Tobacco Forrester

A Massachusetts native, Patricia Tobacco Forrester received a BA from Smith College in 1962, followed by a BFA and MFA from Yale University. The artist's critically acclaimed watercolors are painted directly from nature, often on very large-scale sheets of up to 40 x 60" paper. Her subject matter is primarily trees and flowers against a dramatic landscape vista, painted with an intuitive, lush, expressive sensibility. Forrester lived in San Francisco until moving to Washington, DC, in 1982. She traveled many months of the year, including to the Caribbean, Central and South America, and France and the Mediterranean. She was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1967 and became a member of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1992.

Forrester’s work has been shown widely in hundreds of museum and gallery exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Numerous major museums own her paintings and prints, including the Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Library of Congress; National Academy of Design; Oakland Museum; Yale University Art Gallery; National Museum of Women in the Arts; Smithsonian American Art Museum; National Gallery of Art; and The White House, Executive Office Building in Washington, DC.