Portrait Artist Mississippi

Mississippi Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Adams, Alcorn, Amite, Attala, Benton, Bolivar, Calhoun, Carroll, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Claiborne, Clarke, Clay, Coahoma, Copiah, Covington, DeSoto, Forrest, Franklin, George, Greene, Grenada, Hancock, Harrison, Hinds, Holmes, Humphreys, Issaquena, Itawamba, Jackson, Jasper, Jefferson, Jefferson Davis, Jones, Kemper, Lafayette, Lamar, Lauderdale, Lawrence, Leake, Lee, Leflore, Lincoln, Lowndes, Madison, Marion, Marshall, Monroe, Montgomery, Neshoba, Newton, Noxubee, Oktibbeha, Panola, Pearl River, Perry, Pike, Pontotoc, Prentiss, Quitman, Rankin, Scott, Sharkey, Simpson, Smith, Stone, Sunflower, Tallahatchie, Tate, Tippah, Tishomingo, Tunica, Union, Walthall, Warren, Washington, Wayne, Webster, Wilkinson, Winston, Yalobusha and Yazoo.

Towns in Mississippi Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Jackson, Belhaven, Fondren, Eastover, Woodland Hills, Ridgeland, Madison, Flowood, Brandon, Clinton, Canton, Yazoo City, Vicksburg, Natchez, Woodville, Port Gibson, Brookhaven, McComb, Hattiesburg, Petal, Laurel, Meridian, Columbus, Starkville, West Point, Oxford, Taylor, Water Valley, Tupelo, New Albany, Corinth, Holly Springs, Southaven, Olive Branch, Hernando, Senatobia, Clarksdale, Cleveland, Greenwood, Greenville, Indianola, Leland, Belzoni, Biloxi, Gulfport, Ocean Springs, Pass Christian, Bay St. Louis, Long Beach, Diamondhead and Gautier.

Natchez, Walter Anderson and the Mississippi Portrait

Mississippi produced a painter who spent his last years rowing twelve miles to a barrier island alone and drawing everything he saw there. Walter Anderson is the most extraordinary artist the state has given America, and almost nobody outside it had heard of him until after he died.

The land is Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez homeland, and the Choctaw remain in Neshoba County. The Natchez people built the mounds at the Grand Village. French settlement began at Biloxi in 1699 and Natchez in 1716; the British and Spanish followed; and by the 1830s the cotton land along the river had made Natchez the richest town per head in America. That wealth rested entirely on slavery, and the Delta counties north of Vicksburg were among the most brutal plantation districts in the South.

What survives at Natchez is the largest concentration of antebellum houses in the United States - Stanton Hall, Longwood, Melrose, Dunleith, Rosalie, Auburn and dozens more, saved partly because the town surrendered without a fight in 1863 and partly because the Pilgrimage Garden Club began opening them to visitors in 1932. Longwood, the octagonal house whose Northern workmen downed tools when the war came, still stands unfinished above its completed basement.

Those houses were hung with portraits, and a good many remain in place. Nineteenth-century Mississippi supported itinerant and resident portraitists in every river town, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History holds a substantial record of them.

Marie Hull is the state’s major twentieth-century painter. Born at Summit in 1890, trained in Philadelphia and New York and later in Europe, she taught at Belhaven and Millsaps in Jackson for decades and painted Mississippians of every kind - sharecroppers, professors, children, farm women - with a directness that was unusual for the time and place. Her portraits are the best sustained body of figure painting made in the state.

Walter Anderson was something else entirely. Born in New Orleans in 1903 and settled at Ocean Springs, he worked in his family’s Shearwater Pottery, suffered severe mental illness, and from the 1940s rowed a skiff out to Horn Island to live for weeks at a time drawing pelicans, crabs and the light on the water. After his death in 1965 his family opened a locked room at his cottage and found the walls covered floor to ceiling in a painted mural of the Gulf. The room has been moved intact into the Walter Anderson Museum of Art.

The coast has more of this. George Ohr, the self-styled Mad Potter of Biloxi, threw impossibly thin, crumpled, iridescent pots in the 1890s that nobody wanted; thousands were stored in a shed and rediscovered in 1968, and he is now regarded as a genius. The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, designed by Frank Gehry and finished after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the first attempt, houses them.

Eudora Welty photographed before she wrote. Working for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s she made several hundred portraits of Mississippians - mostly Black, mostly poor, always named where she could name them - with a plain sympathy that has aged extremely well. Her house in Belhaven is preserved as she left it.

The Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson holds the largest collection of the state’s art. Oxford has Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s house, and the University Museum with its Theora Hamblett paintings and Greek and Roman antiquities. The Delta has the B. B. King Museum at Indianola and the blues trail markers that run from Tunica to Vicksburg.

Commissions come from a handful of places. Jackson’s Belhaven, Eastover and Fondren, and out to Madison and Ridgeland. Oxford and Starkville around the universities. Tupelo and the north-east. The DeSoto County suburbs of Memphis at Olive Branch and Hernando. Hattiesburg, Laurel and Meridian. Natchez and Vicksburg on the river. And the coast at Ocean Springs, Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis.

Institutional portraiture is steady: the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State, Southern Miss, Millsaps, Belhaven, Jackson State, Alcorn State, Mississippi University for Women - the first public college for women in America, founded 1884 - the University Medical Center, the state capitol, the federal courts and the older Jackson firms.

Sporting commissions are common, particularly bird dogs and Delta duck-hunting subjects, and coastal families often want the water in the picture. Anderson would have approved of that last one. He thought the Gulf light was the only thing in Mississippi worth getting right.