Carl Gustaf Simon Nelson was a Swedish-American painter and cartoonist .
He was born on January 5, 1898 in Hörby, Skåne, the son of the carriage maker Johan Nilsson and Christina Olsson. Nelson came to America at the age of five and grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. He began studying art around 1920, first for two years at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and then at the Art Students League in New York for five years. He then undertook a study trip through 15 of Europe's countries. Since 1935 he participated in numerous collective exhibitions in New York, Boston and Philadelphia and in the Swedish-American exhibitions in Chicago.
He was awarded the Tiffany Foundation Fellowship 1931-1933. Alongside his own creation, he worked as a teacher at the Boris Mirski Gallery in Boston 1945-1947 and the Cambridge School of Design in Cambridge 1948-1952. His art consists of still lifes , figure motifs,landscapes and non-figurative compositions in oil , gouache and tempera . Nelson is represented at the US Department of Labor in Washington, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Worcester Museum of Art in Massachusetts.
He died in 1988 in Elmhurst, Illinois.
