Commissioning a Portrait in Nashville
Hazel Morgan is a portrait artist serving clients across Nashville. With more than 40 years of fine art expertise, she creates hand-painted oil portraits that are treasured as family heirlooms, corporate centrepieces, and lasting memorials. Her work has been commissioned by private collectors, universities, corporations, and public institutions throughout the region.
Clients in Nashville benefit from Hazel’s established process for working with distant sitters. Whether you prefer to supply photographs or arrange a sitting, every portrait receives the same meticulous attention to detail that has earned Hazel recognition from prestigious art societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Commissioning a Portrait from Nashville
Talking it through first
The first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. By telephone, video call or email, Hazel asks about the person, the setting, the size and above all the room. Nashville houses often have deep porches and long sight lines indoors, and both of those change what size of canvas will work.
The photographs
Most of Hazel's portraits are painted from photographs, and she will tell you what she needs. In a Tennessee summer the problem is haze and glare together: the light is strong but the air is thick, and faces photographed in it lose their modelling. Early morning, or the shade of a porch on a bright day, gives a painter far more to work with. Several photographs can be combined, and a live sitting is possible where it suits.
The painting itself
Six to twelve weeks at the easel, according to how complex the picture is. You see progress photographs as the work develops, which is when changes are simple to make.
Frame, crate, courier
A finished portrait generally arrives in Nashville one to two weeks after the last brushstroke. Framing and shipping are quoted at that point, and Hazel will recommend framers if you want the frame chosen for the painting rather than from a catalogue.
Why Nashville Clients Commission a Painting
Nashville is a city built on the idea that a performance is worth more than a recording of one, and a similar instinct applies to portraits. A photograph documents a face. A painting is a considered account of a person, made by hand, and it is the version that ends up being inherited. What Hazel offers:
- Four decades of full-time practice, and several hundred finished commissions behind her.
- Paintings exhibited with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters.
- Direct contact with the artist from beginning to end. No agency, no studio assistants.
- Staged progress images, and revisions until the likeness is genuinely right.
What Nashville Clients Usually Ask
She does not need to. Working from photographs is her normal method, which is precisely why commissioning from Tennessee is uncomplicated. A live sitting can be arranged when circumstances allow.
Yes, and often does. Equestrian portraits are a substantial part of her work and are almost always painted from photographs. Shoot the horse at its own eye level in soft light, with the handler close by, and send more frames than you think are necessary.
It can. Send photographs of the collection the portrait is joining, including the frames, and Hazel will match format, scale and treatment so the new painting sits with the rest rather than against them.
The wall decides, along with the distance people will view it from. Photograph the room with a chair or a door in the frame for scale, and Hazel will advise at the consultation.
Crated to measure and sent by insured courier to the address you nominate, usually one to two weeks after completion. Shipping and framing are quoted separately.
Further detail on sittings, sizes and timescales is on the frequently asked questions page.
Why Hazel Loves Nashville
Hazel admires Nashville for the way it wears its soul so openly. There is something genuinely rare about a city that celebrates creativity at every corner, from the honky-tonks lining Broadway to the quieter, tree-lined streets of East Nashville, where artists, musicians, and storytellers have built a warm and unpretentious community. Hazel finds that this openness carries over into the people themselves — Nashvillians tend to be direct, expressive, and unafraid to share who they really are. For a portrait painter, that quality is everything. A subject who is comfortable in their own skin makes for a more honest, more alive painting, and in Nashville, Hazel finds that ease in her clients time and again.
Hazel loves the way Nashville's cultural life runs deep beneath its famous musical surface. The Frist Art Museum has long been a place she visits whenever she is in the city, drawing quiet inspiration from its rotating exhibitions and the thoughtful way it connects the wider community to visual art. She appreciates that Nashville takes painting, sculpture, and craft seriously alongside its songwriting heritage. That respect for multiple creative disciplines means her clients often arrive with a genuine curiosity about the portrait process — they ask considered questions, they engage with the work, and they bring real stories to the sitting. Those conversations shape the portraits in ways that are hard to put into words but impossible to miss when you see the finished canvas.
Hazel also admires the neighbourhoods of Nashville for the distinct character each one carries. The Gulch feels polished and forward-looking, while 12 South has a relaxed, neighbourhood-bookshop kind of warmth that she finds quietly endearing. These are places built by people who care about where they live, and that pride shows up in the faces of the people Hazel paints. She often says that a portrait is really a distillation of everything a person carries — their history, their passions, their humour — and Nashville gives its residents plenty worth carrying.
Hazel also loves returning to Nashville simply because the clients she has worked with there have become lasting connections. The generosity and genuine friendliness she encounters feel less like regional politeness and more like a sincere way of moving through the world. That spirit finds its way into every portrait she makes here, and she hopes it always will.
Start a Nashville Commission
The first conversation is free and there is no obligation of any kind. Describe what you have in mind and Hazel will reply with a quotation prepared for your painting.
Request a Free ConsultationNashville Neighbourhoods and Towns Hazel's Clients Live In
Belle Meade, Forest Hills, Oak Hill, Green Hills, Whitland, Richland, West Meade, Hillwood, Sylvan Park, Hillsboro Village, Belmont, 12 South, Melrose, East Nashville, Lockeland Springs, Germantown, Salemtown, The Gulch, Bellevue, Brentwood, Franklin, Leiper's Fork, Grassland, Cool Springs, Nolensville, Thompson's Station, Spring Hill, College Grove, Arrington, Fairview, Kingston Springs, Hendersonville, Gallatin, Goodlettsville, Mount Juliet, Lebanon, Murfreesboro, Smyrna and Columbia.The Parthenon, the Stieglitz Collection and Nashville Portraiture
Nashville is the only American city with a full-scale Parthenon standing in a public park, and the story of how it got there explains a good deal about the place. It was built for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897, in plaster, as a temporary pavilion. The city liked it too much to pull down, and rebuilt it permanently in concrete between 1920 and 1931. It is now the city art museum, holding the Cowan Collection of American paintings, and since 1990 it has contained Alan LeQuire's forty-two-foot statue of Athena. A city that keeps a temporary building for well over a century is a city that treats permanence as a value.
The real art surprise here is at Fisk University. In 1949 Georgia O'Keeffe gave Fisk one hundred and one works from the estate of her husband Alfred Stieglitz, including pieces by Cezanne, Renoir, Picasso, Diego Rivera, Charles Demuth and O'Keeffe herself. It went to a historically Black university in the segregated South at O'Keeffe's own insistence, and the Stieglitz Collection is still there and still shown. There is no better room in Tennessee in which to study how a painter handles a human face.
Downtown, the Frist Art Museum occupies the 1934 main post office, one of the finest art deco interiors in the South, and since 2001 it has operated with no permanent collection at all, borrowing everything it shows. Out on Cheek Road, Cheekwood is the estate that Maxwell House coffee money built in the 1930s, with a Georgian revival house, an American art collection inside it and fifty-five acres of gardens around it. Between the two you can see both halves of Nashville's taste, the civic and the domestic.
Then there is the horse history, which is older than the music. Belle Meade was one of the great thoroughbred nurseries of the nineteenth century, and the stallion Iroquois, who stood there, had in 1881 become the first American-bred horse to win the Epsom Derby. The Iroquois Steeplechase has been run in Percy Warner Park since 1941. Equestrian portraiture in Middle Tennessee is not a novelty, it is a local tradition with a century and a half behind it, and the standards are accordingly high.
Portrait collections here are working collections. Vanderbilt, founded on Commodore Vanderbilt's gift of 1873, along with Fisk, Belmont, Meharry Medical College and the older banks and law firms, all hold portraits of founders, deans and chairs, and all still add to them. Even the Country Music Hall of Fame marks its inductees with bronze portrait plaques rather than photographs, which tells you what this city thinks a likeness is for.
The houses are part of it too. Belmont Mansion was built for Adelicia Acklen in the 1850s and was among the largest houses in the antebellum South. Belle Meade's mansion still stands on its old stud farm. Around them, Belle Meade, Forest Hills and Oak Hill are neighbourhoods of large rooms, high ceilings and tall sash windows, and south into Williamson County the same instinct produces new houses built to the same proportions. These are rooms where a painting at proper scale looks intended rather than imposed.
What a Nashville portrait tends to want is directness with some warmth in it. Not grandeur for its own sake, and certainly not stiffness, but a straight likeness of someone who looks as though they would speak to you. It is the hardest kind to paint well and the most satisfying to get right.
