Mel Leipzig, an acclaimed figurative painter whose passion for detail transformed depictions of fellow New Jerseyans in mundane settings into mesmerizing enigmas, died on Nov. 1 in Princeton, N.J. He was 90.

Mr. Leipzig (pronounced LIPE-zug), who long resided in Trenton, died in a nursing home, said his daughter, Francesca Leipzig Picone.

The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1979 that Mr. Leipzig’s “sense of mysterious emotional tensions in strongly characterized ordinary people makes him, perhaps, the Chekhov of Trenton,” referring to the Russian dramatist who revealed the melancholy interior lives of his subjects.

In contrast to many contemporaries working in Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism, Mr. Leipzig was so devoted to verisimilitude that his favorite of his works was a 1991 acrylic on canvas view of his son, Joshua, sitting insouciantly in a bedroom festooned with graffiti and dirty laundry while three musician friends sprawl on the floor.

ImageMr. Leipzig was so devoted to verisimilitude that his favorite work was a 1991 acrylic on canvas view of his son, Joshua, sitting insouciantly in a bedroom festooned with graffiti and dirty laundry while three musician friends sprawl on the floor. Credit...via Gallery Henoch

Mr. Leipzig never painted from photographs. Instead, he recruited models from among his relatives, neighbors and colleagues. During an early stint in Paris, he offered spaghetti dinners to persuade students to pose. He used student models when he taught at Mercer County Community College, near Trenton. There, as a professor of fine art and art history, he mentored generations, from 1968 until he retired in 2013.

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