Commissioning a Portrait in Missouri
Hazel Morgan provides a bespoke portrait painting service to clients throughout Missouri. An award-winning artist with over four decades of professional experience, Hazel creates hand-painted oil portraits of exceptional quality for individuals, families, corporations, and institutions across the state.
From the boardroom to the family home, Hazel’s portraits have graced the walls of distinguished collectors, university halls, and corporate headquarters throughout Missouri. Each commission begins with a personal consultation and results in a work of enduring artistic merit.
Portrait Artist Missouri Area
As your trusted Portrait Artist Missouri, Hazel Morgan serves portrait clients in Missouri and the surrounding communities. Portraits are shipped directly to your door with professional packaging and full insurance coverage.
How to Commission a Portrait from Missouri
Commissioning a portrait from Hazel Morgan is a collaborative and enjoyable experience, regardless of where you are located in Missouri. The process has been refined over hundreds of commissions to ensure a seamless experience for every client.
Step 1: Initial Consultation
The process begins with a complimentary consultation - by telephone, video call, or email - during which Hazel discusses your vision for the portrait. This covers the subject, preferred composition, size, background, clothing, and any particular details you would like to include. There is no obligation at this stage.
Step 2: Photographs & References
For clients in Missouri, Hazel can work from professional photographs, high-quality personal photographs, or a combination of multiple reference images. She provides clear guidance on the types of photographs that produce the best results. Where feasible, live sittings can also be arranged.
Step 3: The Painting Process
Once the composition is agreed, Hazel begins painting. The process typically takes between six and twelve weeks depending on the complexity of the piece. Clients receive progress photographs at key stages so you can see the portrait taking shape and provide feedback before completion.
Step 4: Delivery & Framing
Completed portraits are professionally packaged for shipping. Shipping and framing costs are provided once the painting is complete. Hazel can also recommend master framers who specialise in fine art framing to complement your finished portrait. Clients in Missouri typically receive their portrait within one to two weeks of completion.
Why Clients in Missouri Choose Hazel Morgan
Hazel Morgan brings a rare combination of artistic excellence, professional reliability, and personal warmth to every commission. Here is what sets her apart:
Over 40 years of professional experience - Hazel has been painting portraits professionally since the early 1980s, amassing a body of work that spans hundreds of commissions for private, corporate, and institutional clients worldwide.
Award-winning recognition - Her work has been exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and other prestigious venues. She is a member of several leading art societies.
A personal, one-to-one service - Unlike studio operations, every portrait is painted entirely by Hazel herself. You deal directly with the artist from first consultation through to delivery, ensuring your vision is faithfully realised.
International shipping expertise - Hazel regularly ships completed portraits to clients across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond. Every painting is professionally packaged to arrive in perfect condition.
Complete satisfaction guaranteed - Hazel works closely with each client throughout the painting process. Progress images are shared at every stage, and adjustments are made until you are completely happy with the finished portrait.
Frequently Asked Questions - Portrait Commissions in Missouri
Hazel provides personalized quotations after an initial telephone consultation, during which she discusses your specific requirements. The consultation is complimentary and entirely without obligation. Please get in touch to arrange a convenient time to talk.
Not at all. The majority of Hazel’s commissions are painted from photographs, which makes the process convenient for clients in Missouri and beyond. Hazel provides guidance on the best types of photographs to supply. Live sittings can be arranged where practical.
Most portraits are completed within six to twelve weeks from the start of painting, depending on the complexity of the commission. Hazel provides a realistic timeline during the initial consultation. Rush commissions can sometimes be accommodated for special occasions.
Hazel has extensive experience working with a range of photographic references, including older or lower-resolution images. She can often combine multiple photographs to create a single cohesive portrait. During the consultation, she will advise on whether your available photographs are suitable.
Completed portraits are professionally packaged using custom-built crating and shipped via insured courier directly to your address in Missouri. Shipping and framing are quoted separately after the portrait is completed.
Client satisfaction is paramount. Hazel shares progress photographs at key stages throughout the painting process so you can provide feedback and request adjustments. This collaborative approach means that by the time the portrait is complete, it faithfully reflects your vision.
Why Hazel Loves Missouri
Missouri has a way of weaving together history, natural beauty, and genuine community spirit that Hazel Morgan finds endlessly inspiring as a portrait artist. What captivates Hazel about this state is the remarkable diversity of human stories rooted in its landscape - from the sweeping bluffs above the Missouri River to the vibrant cultural energy of cities like St. Louis and Kansas City. Hazel is drawn to the way St. Louis's Saint Louis Art Museum, perched in Forest Park, represents a deep civic commitment to the arts, sitting alongside the Missouri History Museum and the Muny outdoor theater in one of the most celebrated urban parks in the country. That concentration of culture in a single, beloved public space speaks to something Hazel deeply admires - a community that takes pride in making beauty accessible to everyone.
Hazel finds particular inspiration in Missouri's rich tapestry of neighborhoods and historic districts. The Cherokee Street arts corridor in St. Louis, with its murals, galleries, and independent studios, pulses with the kind of authentic creative energy that reminds Hazel why portraiture matters - it honors real people living real, textured lives. Kansas City's 18th and Vine Historic District, the birthplace of American jazz and home to the American Jazz Museum, carries a soulful legacy that Hazel admires enormously, seeing in it a testament to the enduring power of artistic expression to define a community's identity. Even the iconic Route 66 towns and the rolling Ozark highlands, where events like the Dogwood Festival in Camdenton celebrate local tradition with genuine warmth, reflect a Missouri that is proud of its roots and eager to share them.
What resonates most deeply with Hazel is Missouri's people - their warmth, their resilience, and the way they carry their histories visibly in their faces and stories. The Columbia farmers market, the Gateway Arch rising above the Mississippi River, the handcrafted character of Hermann's wine country - these are the textures of a place that produces unforgettable subjects. For Hazel, creating portraits for Missouri clients means honoring individuals shaped by one of America's most storied and soulful states.
Ready to Commission Your Portrait?
Begin with a complimentary, no-obligation consultation. Hazel would love to discuss your portrait ideas and provide a personalized quotation for clients in Missouri.
Request a Free ConsultationMissouri Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In
Adair, Andrew, Atchison, Audrain, Barry, Barton, Bates, Benton, Bollinger, Boone, Buchanan, Butler, Caldwell, Callaway, Camden, Cape Girardeau, Carroll, Carter, Cass, Cedar, Chariton, Christian, Clark, Clay, Clinton, Cole, Cooper, Crawford, Dade, Dallas, Daviess, DeKalb, Dent, Douglas, Dunklin, Franklin, Gasconade, Gentry, Greene, Grundy, Harrison, Henry, Hickory, Holt, Howard, Howell, Iron, Jackson, Jasper, Jefferson, Johnson, Knox, Laclede, Lafayette, Lawrence, Lewis, Lincoln, Linn, Livingston, Macon, Madison, Maries, Marion, McDonald, Mercer, Miller, Mississippi, Moniteau, Monroe, Montgomery, Morgan, New Madrid, Newton, Nodaway, Oregon, Osage, Ozark, Pemiscot, Perry, Pettis, Phelps, Pike, Platte, Polk, Pulaski, Putnam, Ralls, Randolph, Ray, Reynolds, Ripley, Saline, Schuyler, Scotland, Scott, Shannon, Shelby, St. Charles, St. Clair, St. Francois, St. Louis County, St. Louis City, Ste. Genevieve, Stoddard, Stone, Sullivan, Taney, Texas, Vernon, Warren, Washington, Wayne, Webster, Worth and Wright.
Towns in Missouri Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
St. Louis, Central West End, Lafayette Square, Compton Heights, Clayton, Ladue, Frontenac, Huntleigh, Creve Coeur, Town and Country, Chesterfield, Kirkwood, Webster Groves, Glendale, University City, Wildwood, St. Charles, Defiance, Augusta, Washington, Ste. Genevieve, Cape Girardeau, Kansas City, Country Club District, Sunset Hill, Mission Hills, Brookside, Hyde Park KC, Leawood, Parkville, Weston, Liberty, Lee’s Summit, Independence, Columbia, Jefferson City, Rocheport, Arrow Rock, Boonville, Hermann, Springfield, Branson, Table Rock Lake, Lake of the Ozarks, Osage Beach, Joplin, Sedalia, Fulton, Kirksville, St. Joseph and Hannibal.
George Caleb Bingham and the Missouri Portrait
Missouri produced two painters who defined how America pictured itself in the nineteenth century and again in the twentieth, and both of them made portraiture central to what they did. Neither would have called himself a society painter, and that is exactly why they matter.
The land sat at the meeting of the great rivers. Osage and Missouria peoples lived here; Ste. Genevieve was founded by the French around 1750 and remains the best-preserved French colonial village in the country. St. Louis followed in 1764. After 1803 Missouri became the doorway to the West - the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Santa Fe Trail from Franklin, the Oregon Trail from Independence, and later the great steamboat trade.
George Caleb Bingham grew up at Franklin in Howard County and taught himself to paint. He worked as an itinerant portraitist across the river towns from the 1830s, charging a few dollars a head, and painted several hundred Missourians before he turned to the subjects that made him famous - fur traders on the Missouri, boatmen dancing, county elections. What lifts those pictures above genre painting is that every figure in them is a portrait, observed from life.
Bingham took politics seriously too. He served in the legislature, was Missouri’s state treasurer during the Civil War, and painted Order No. 11 as a direct protest against the forced depopulation of the western counties. Few American painters have used a picture that way.
Thomas Hart Benton, born in Neosho in 1889 and great-nephew of the senator, came back to Missouri after New York and made himself the leading Regionalist. His murals - at the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City, at the Truman Library, at the Nelson-Atkins - are packed with recognisable Missourians. He also taught Jackson Pollock, which he found funny.
The museums are unusually good. The Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, opened in 1933 with money from a newspaper publisher and a schoolteacher, is one of the finest museums in America and free to enter. The Saint Louis Art Museum occupies Cass Gilbert’s Palace of Fine Arts from the 1904 World’s Fair, and has been publicly funded since. Add the Pulitzer, the Kemper, the Contemporary and Laumeier, and the state is well served.
The 1904 World’s Fair changed St. Louis permanently. It drew twenty million visitors, left Forest Park and the museum behind, and confirmed a city already rich on brewing, shoes, riverboats and rail. Anheuser-Busch, Danforth, Pulitzer, Desloge and Busch families built the houses in the Central West End and out along the private streets of Ladue and Clayton.
Kansas City did something different. J. C. Nichols laid out the Country Club District from 1908 with the Country Club Plaza at its centre, and it remains one of the most carefully planned residential quarters in America - fountains, sculpture, tile and stone, a deliberate attempt to build beauty into a suburb. It works, and it has held its value and its families for a century.
Commissions come from both cities and from the country between them. St. Louis: Ladue, Frontenac, Huntleigh, Clayton, the Central West End, Kirkwood and Webster Groves. Kansas City: Sunset Hill, Mission Hills, Brookside, and over the line into Leawood. Columbia and Jefferson City. The Missouri River wine country at Augusta, Defiance and Hermann. The Ozarks around Table Rock and the Lake of the Ozarks.
Institutional portraiture is active. The University of Missouri, Washington University, Saint Louis University, Rockhurst, William Woods, Westminster College at Fulton - where Churchill gave the Iron Curtain speech - the medical schools, the state capitol, the federal courts and the older firms in both cities all keep and commission portraits.
A Missouri sitter often wants something with a bit of the outdoors in it. Bird dogs, horses, a river, a farm that has been in the family since before the war. This is a state where a great many prosperous families are only a generation or two off the land and are not embarrassed about it.
That is the Bingham inheritance, really. He painted Missourians as they were - shrewd, weathered, entirely unpretentious - and it is still the most flattering way to paint them.