Portrait Artist New York

New York Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Albany, Allegany, Bronx, Broome, Cattaraugus, Cayuga, Chautauqua, Chemung, Chenango, Clinton, Columbia, Cortland, Delaware, Dutchess, Erie, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Genesee, Greene, Hamilton, Herkimer, Jefferson, Kings, Lewis, Livingston, Madison, Monroe, Montgomery, Nassau, New York, Niagara, Oneida, Onondaga, Ontario, Orange, Orleans, Oswego, Otsego, Putnam, Queens, Rensselaer, Richmond, Rockland, Saratoga, Schenectady, Schoharie, Schuyler, Seneca, St. Lawrence, Steuben, Suffolk, Sullivan, Tioga, Tompkins, Ulster, Warren, Washington, Wayne, Westchester, Wyoming and Yates.

Towns in New York Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Greenwich Village, Tribeca, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Riverdale, Bronxville, Scarsdale, Rye, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, Chappaqua, Armonk, Katonah, Bedford, Pound Ridge, Mount Kisco, Purchase, Harrison, Irvington, Dobbs Ferry, Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Garden City, Manhasset, Sands Point, Old Westbury, Muttontown, Oyster Bay, Locust Valley, Lloyd Harbour, Cold Spring Harbor, Huntington, Southampton, Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, Water Mill, East Hampton, Amagansett, Sag Harbor, Shelter Island, Quogue, Westhampton Beach, Rhinebeck, Millbrook, Hudson, Kinderhook, Cooperstown, Skaneateles, Saratoga Springs, Lake George, Cazenovia, East Aurora and Orchard Park.

How New York Shaped the American Portrait

No American state has done more to shape how portraits are painted, sold, exhibited and argued about than New York. What began as a small Dutch trading settlement became, within three centuries, the place where the market for art in the western world is largely set. The portrait has been present at every stage of that story, sometimes at the centre and sometimes in deliberate opposition to whatever was fashionable.

Before Europeans arrived, the region was home to the Haudenosaunee confederacy in the north and west and Lenape and Munsee-speaking peoples around the harbour and the lower Hudson. Their visual traditions ran to wampum, quillwork, carved wood and painted hide, forms in which identity, alliance and lineage were recorded with great precision but never through the painted likeness.

Dutch settlement began in the 1620s, and the earliest surviving portraits from the colony are the work of the anonymous limners who served the Hudson Valley patroon families through the first half of the eighteenth century. These paintings are frequently described as naive, but they are nothing of the kind. They are highly conventional works made to a clear brief, recording property, marriage and descent for families who intended to hold land for a very long time.

Under British rule the colony attracted trained painters. John Smibert, Thomas McIlworth and later Gilbert Stuart all worked in New York, and the standard rose sharply. By the time of the Revolution a New York merchant could commission a portrait that would not have looked out of place in London, and increasingly expected to.

The nineteenth century turned New York into the centre of American art. The National Academy of Design was founded in 1825, the same year Thomas Cole first exhibited the Hudson River views that would define a school. Landscape briefly eclipsed the portrait in ambition, but Cole, Frederic Church and their circle established New York as the place where an American artist had to be seen, and portrait painters followed the audience.

Gilded Age wealth then made society portraiture into an industry. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870, Fifth Avenue filled with houses built to display collections, and the great international portraitists came to serve them. John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini painted New Yorkers with a fluency and flattery that has never quite gone out of fashion, and set the standard against which grand portraiture is still measured.

A reaction followed almost immediately. The painters known as the Ashcan School, who exhibited together as The Eight in 1908, turned to the city’s tenements, bars and waterfronts. Robert Henri in particular was a portrait painter of real force, and his insistence that character mattered more than finish changed what an American portrait was allowed to look like.

The Armory Show of 1913 was the decisive rupture. European modernism arrived in New York at scale, and the terms of the argument changed permanently. Within two decades the city had built the institutions to house what followed: the Museum of Modern Art in 1929, the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939.

After the Second World War New York took the leadership of western art outright. Abstract Expressionism made figuration look provincial for a generation, and the commissioned portrait retreated to the boardroom and the club. That it survived at all owed much to painters who refused the choice, and to the steady institutional demand of universities, banks, courts and hospitals that never stopped needing faces on their walls.

The revival came from within the city. Alice Neel painted her neighbours in Spanish Harlem and on the Upper West Side with an honesty that made the society portrait look evasive. Chuck Close rebuilt the human face from grids and photographs. Andy Warhol, from the 1970s, turned the commissioned portrait into a business again, painting collectors and socialites in editions and proving there was still a market willing to pay.

Today New York’s commissioning runs along familiar lines. Manhattan supplies institutional and family work; Westchester and the Gold Coast of Long Island supply established households; the Hamptons and the Hudson Valley supply second homes with wall space and owners who collect. The state also holds the highest concentration of serious private collections in the country, which means clients here tend to arrive with an educated eye and firm opinions.

Contemporary New York portraiture covers everything from photorealism to the deliberately unfinished, and the city remains where a portrait painter’s work is most likely to be seriously judged. Yet the commissions themselves are as domestic as anywhere else. A grandmother, a pair of children, a founder retiring after forty years. In the noisiest art market on earth, people still want the quietest thing painting can offer: one person, looked at properly, for a long time.