Portrait Artist Maryland

Maryland Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Allegany, Anne Arundel, Baltimore County, Baltimore City, Calvert, Caroline, Carroll, Cecil, Charles, Dorchester, Frederick, Garrett, Harford, Howard, Kent, Montgomery, Prince George’s, Queen Anne’s, Somerset, St. Mary’s, Talbot, Washington, Wicomico and Worcester.

Towns in Maryland Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Baltimore, Roland Park, Guilford, Homeland, Ruxton, Lutherville, Timonium, Towson, Green Spring Valley, Stevenson, Owings Mills, Monkton, Glyndon, Annapolis, Severna Park, Arnold, Crownsville, Davidsonville, Edgewater, Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Potomac, Kensington, Garrett Park, Rockville, North Bethesda, Silver Spring, Takoma Park, Olney, Brookeville, Poolesville, Frederick, Middletown, Ellicott City, Clarksville, Columbia, Westminster, Easton, Oxford, St. Michaels, Royal Oak, Cambridge, Chestertown, Centreville, Queenstown, Berlin, Ocean City, Salisbury, Leonardtown, Hagerstown, Cumberland and Havre de Grace.

Charles Willson Peale and the Maryland Portrait

If one family invented the American portrait as a family enterprise, it was the Peales, and they were Marylanders. Charles Willson Peale was born in Queen Anne’s County in 1741, and what he started shaped how the young republic pictured itself.

The land was Piscataway, Nanticoke and Susquehannock homeland. The Calverts founded their colony in 1634 at St. Mary’s City on terms of religious toleration unusual for the age, and Maryland grew rich on tobacco, on Chesapeake trade and later on Baltimore shipping. The Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland kept a plantation society; Baltimore became a merchant city with a temper of its own.

Peale began as a saddler in Annapolis. Local gentlemen subscribed to send him to London to study under Benjamin West, and he came back a painter. He painted George Washington from life seven times, beginning in 1772 when Washington was still a Virginia colonel — the earliest known likeness of him. He fought in the Revolution, sat in the Pennsylvania assembly, founded a museum, and dug up a mastodon.

He also raised a dynasty. Rembrandt, Raphaelle, Rubens and Titian Peale; his brother James; his nieces Sarah Miriam and Anna Claypoole Peale, who were among the first professional women painters in America and were elected to the Pennsylvania Academy. Sarah Miriam Peale worked as a portraitist in Baltimore for twenty years and made a living at it, which was almost unheard of for a woman then.

Baltimore built the institutions. The Peale Museum of 1814, put up by Rembrandt Peale, was the first purpose-built museum building in the western hemisphere and still stands. The Walters Art Museum came from two generations of one family’s collecting and was left to the city outright. The Baltimore Museum of Art holds the Cone Collection — Claribel and Etta Cone’s extraordinary Matisses, bought directly from the artist.

Annapolis is the other pole. The Maryland State House is the oldest state capitol in continuous legislative use in the country, and it was where Washington resigned his commission in 1783 — a scene painted many times since. The state’s official portrait collection there is one of the oldest in America, and the United States Naval Academy has kept a serious tradition of official portraiture since 1845.

The Eastern Shore has a character of its own: Talbot County, Easton, Oxford and St. Michaels, where waterfront houses have passed through the same families for a long time, and where sporting and retriever portraits are as ordinary a commission as any. The Chesapeake shapes the way people here think about what is worth recording.

North and west of Baltimore lies horse country. The Green Spring Valley, My Lady’s Manor, Monkton and Glyndon have supported hunting and steeplechasing since the nineteenth century, and the Maryland Hunt Cup, first run in 1894, is among the most demanding races anywhere. Equestrian portraiture here is a living practice, not a period revival.

Montgomery County is different again — Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Potomac and Kensington, close enough to Washington that the sitters are often people whose working lives were spent in government, medicine, law or diplomacy. Portraits there tend to mark a career as much as a family.

Institutional commissions are unusually plentiful. Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland, St. John’s College in Annapolis, Washington College in Chestertown — the tenth-oldest in the country and the only one George Washington allowed to use his name — the Naval Academy, the National Institutes of Health, the courts, and the old Baltimore firms and clubs.

So the range within one small state is wide: a waterman’s town on the Shore, a hunting valley, a Baltimore rowhouse neighbourhood, a Bethesda household of physicians. Maryland calls itself America in Miniature for its geography, and the description holds for its portraits too.

Peale would recognise it. He painted merchants, soldiers, governors and his own enormous family with the same unhurried attention, and never treated a likeness as a formality. That is still the right instinct here.