Portrait Artist Massachusetts

Massachusetts Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Barnstable, Berkshire, Bristol, Dukes, Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, Nantucket, Norfolk, Plymouth, Suffolk and Worcester.

Towns in Massachusetts Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Beacon Hill, Back Bay, Louisburg Square, Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, Brookline, Newton, Wellesley, Weston, Dover, Sherborn, Lincoln, Concord, Carlisle, Sudbury, Wayland, Belmont, Winchester, Lexington, Andover, North Andover, Boxford, Topsfield, Hamilton, Wenham, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Beverly Farms, Prides Crossing, Marblehead, Ipswich, Rockport, Gloucester, Duxbury, Cohasset, Hingham, Scituate, Marion, Osterville, Wianno, Cotuit, Chatham, Harwich Port, Edgartown, Vineyard Haven, West Tisbury, Nantucket, Siasconset, Stockbridge, Lenox, Great Barrington, Williamstown, Milton and Dedham.

Boston, Copley and the Beginning of American Portraiture

Massachusetts is where American portrait painting began. Before there was an American school of anything, there were painters in Boston taking commissions from merchants who wanted to look like gentlemen, and the standard they reached was extraordinarily high. The state has been arguing about how to paint a face for three hundred years, and it has never really stopped.

The land was home to the Wampanoag, Massachusett and Nipmuc peoples, whose visual traditions centred on wampum, basketry, carved wood and quillwork - forms in which lineage and standing were recorded with precision, though never through the painted likeness.

The first professionally trained painter to settle in the colonies arrived here. John Smibert, a Scot who had studied in Italy, reached Boston in 1729 and opened a studio that functioned as the first real art school in America, complete with copies of European masters that later painters came specifically to study. Robert Feke and Joseph Blackburn followed, and the town developed a genuine market.

Then came the painter who changed everything. John Singleton Copley, born in Boston in 1738 and largely self-taught, produced portraits of colonial Bostonians of a psychological sharpness that had no American precedent and few European equals. His sitters look uncomfortably real. He left for London in 1774 and never returned, and American painting spent the next century trying to match what he had done before he was thirty-five.

After independence, Gilbert Stuart settled in Boston and spent his last years there, dying in the city in 1828. Between Copley and Stuart, Massachusetts had produced or housed the two most consequential portrait painters in American history within a single lifetime.

Institutions came early and stayed serious. The Boston Athenaeum began exhibiting art in 1827. The Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1870 and opened to the public in 1876. In 1903 Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her Venetian palace on the Fenway, arranged exactly as she wished and required by her will to stay that way - one of the most personal major collections anywhere in the world.

John Singer Sargent, though not a Bostonian, is inseparable from the city. He painted its society for three decades and spent much of his later career on the murals at the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts. His portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner still hangs in her museum.

Sargent’s presence helped produce a genuine local school. The Boston School painters - Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson and William McGregor Paxton chief among them - combined French academic training with a particular interest in interior light and the figure. They were, above all, portrait painters, and they taught at the Museum School for decades, which is why technically rigorous figure painting persisted in Boston long after it had gone out of fashion elsewhere.

Massachusetts also holds the densest concentration of institutional portraiture in the country. Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Williams, Amherst, Smith, Wellesley and Boston College, together with the hospitals of the Longwood Medical Area, the courts, and firms founded in the eighteenth century, have commissioned formal portraits continuously for generations. In Boston, a painted portrait marking a retirement is not a novelty; it is an expectation.

Private commissioning follows old geography. Beacon Hill and Back Bay, the western suburbs from Brookline through Wellesley to Weston, Dover and Lincoln, the North Shore from Manchester-by-the-Sea to Prides Crossing, the South Shore around Duxbury and Cohasset, and the summer communities of Nantucket, the Vineyard and the Berkshires.

Clients here tend to know what they are looking at. Many grew up visiting the MFA and the Gardner, have opinions about Copley, and understand the difference between a portrait that flatters and one that observes. Massachusetts is a demanding place to paint a portrait, in the best sense.

What has not changed since Smibert opened his studio is the underlying reason for the commission. A family with a long view of itself wants a face recorded properly, once, by hand. New England is not given to display, but it is deeply given to continuity, and a portrait is continuity you can hang on a wall.