Lennart Anderson studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cranbrook Academy, and at the Art Students League under Edwin Dickinson. He is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is an Associate of the National Academy of Design. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Tiffany Foundation grant, the Rome Prize, and awards from the National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has a distinguished exhibition history and his work is in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum,The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Delaware Art Museum.
Best known for his large allegorical idylls, street scenes, portraits, figures and still lifes, one can feel the spirits of Degas, Piero, and Chardin, echoing through his work. Anderson, however adds to the dialog with a pitch and touch that is near perfect. He has written that "For me, painting from nature is akin to playing music.The notes are there. One tries to get them down in the proper proportion to bring out the proper impression. One seeks to disarm the objects as objects to seek for an agreement of tone that encompasses differences of color that can cross the barriers of object. It is these agreements, these similarities that float in and out that coordinate the work and allow the subject matter to have its eloquence. It amazes me how the same material can be seen in so many different ways all in an honest attempt to see it justly."
Maureen Mullarkey observed that Anderson is "[a painter] of extraordinary power. In his hands, the things of the table assume a grandeur we had missed before seeing them through his eyes. He makes of them what Velasquez did not decorative items but sacramental ones, ordinary things elevated by their service to life. ... No canon of forms and motifs, no codex of rules, can substitute for that gracious and tender assent to earthly potential that touches Anderson's work.Therein lies the genius that can not be imitated."