Portrait Artist Illinois

Illinois Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Adams, Alexander, Bond, Boone, Brown, Bureau, Calhoun, Carroll, Cass, Champaign, Christian, Clark, Clay, Clinton, Coles, Cook, Crawford, Cumberland, DeKalb, De Witt, Douglas, DuPage, Edgar, Edwards, Effingham, Fayette, Ford, Franklin, Fulton, Gallatin, Greene, Grundy, Hamilton, Hancock, Hardin, Henderson, Henry, Iroquois, Jackson, Jasper, Jefferson, Jersey, Jo Daviess, Johnson, Kane, Kankakee, Kendall, Knox, Lake, LaSalle, Lawrence, Lee, Livingston, Logan, Macon, Macoupin, Madison, Marion, Marshall, Mason, Massac, McDonough, McHenry, McLean, Menard, Mercer, Monroe, Montgomery, Morgan, Moultrie, Ogle, Peoria, Perry, Piatt, Pike, Pope, Pulaski, Putnam, Randolph, Richland, Rock Island, Saline, Sangamon, Schuyler, Scott, Shelby, St. Clair, Stark, Stephenson, Tazewell, Union, Vermilion, Wabash, Warren, Washington, Wayne, White, Whiteside, Will, Williamson, Winnebago and Woodford.

Towns in Illinois Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Chicago, Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, Streeterville, Hyde Park, Beverly, Winnetka, Kenilworth, Glencoe, Highland Park, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff, Wilmette, Evanston, Northfield, Northbrook, Deerfield, Barrington, Barrington Hills, Inverness, South Barrington, Hinsdale, Oak Brook, Burr Ridge, Clarendon Hills, Western Springs, La Grange, Downers Grove, Naperville, Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, Elmhurst, Oak Park, River Forest, Riverside, Long Grove, Libertyville, Lake Zurich, Geneva, St. Charles, Batavia, Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, Bloomington, Champaign, Urbana, Galena, Quincy, Decatur, Moline and Edwardsville.

Chicago, Commerce and the Painted Portrait in Illinois

Illinois is the state where American portraiture met industrial money, and the encounter produced something distinctive: a portrait tradition tied less to inherited land than to what a family built in one or two generations.

The land was Illinois Confederacy, Potawatomi, Kickapoo and Sauk homeland, and before that it held Cahokia — the largest city north of Mexico, with a population in the twelfth century greater than London’s at the time. Its earthworks still stand near Collinsville. French traders came in the 1670s, Americans after 1800, and statehood arrived in 1818.

Chicago grew faster than any city has grown before or since. From a settlement of a few hundred in 1830 it became the second city of the United States by 1890, and the Great Fire of 1871 cleared the way for a rebuilding that invented the skyscraper and set the terms for modern American architecture.

The fortunes that came out of it — Field, Palmer, Armour, Pullman, McCormick, Ryerson, Swift — behaved in a particular way. Rather than simply buying pictures of themselves, they bought pictures for the city. Bertha Palmer went to Paris, took advice from Mary Cassatt, and brought back the Impressionist paintings that became the foundation of the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection.

The Art Institute, founded in 1879, is one of the great museums of the world, and its school has trained painters for well over a century. Chicago also has the Terra Foundation’s American art holdings, the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, the Driehaus, and the Illinois State Museum in Springfield.

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was the turning point. Its White City announced that Chicago intended to be judged by European standards, and the portrait commissions that followed reflected it. John Singer Sargent painted Chicagoans. So did Anders Zorn, whose portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner was painted after the Fair, and who found ready patrons among the city’s new fortunes.

Illinois produced its own painters too. George Healy, though Boston-born, settled in Chicago and painted Lincoln from life — his portrait hangs in the White House. Later came Ivan Albright, born in North Harvey in 1897, whose obsessively detailed figure paintings are unlike anyone else’s, and Archibald Motley, who trained at the Art Institute and painted Black Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s with a colour sense nobody has matched.

Lincoln himself matters here more than anywhere. He practised law in Springfield for twenty-four years, and the state has commissioned, collected and argued over his likeness ever since. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is the fullest expression of it. Illinois has thought harder about what a portrait of a public figure ought to do than most states ever have.

Commissions come from a well-defined geography. The North Shore — Winnetka, Kenilworth, Glencoe, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff — where the houses were built for pictures. Hinsdale, Oak Brook and Burr Ridge in the western suburbs. Barrington Hills and Long Grove. The city itself: the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, Beverly. And downstate in Springfield, Peoria, Bloomington and Champaign–Urbana.

Institutional portraiture is unusually active. Northwestern, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Loyola, DePaul, the medical centres, the state capitol, the federal courts on Dearborn, the Chicago Club, the Union League Club and the older LaSalle Street firms all maintain portrait collections and keep adding.

One local habit is worth noting. Chicago families often commission at a founding moment rather than a retirement — when a business is handed on, when a house is finished, when a generation reaches a particular age. It is a forward-looking use of portraiture, and it suits the city.

That is really the Illinois character in a sentence. This is a place that built itself deliberately, twice, and takes a certain pride in the record. A painted portrait is part of how that record is kept.