Commissioning a Portrait in Nebraska
Hazel Morgan provides a bespoke portrait painting service to clients throughout Nebraska. 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 Nebraska. Each commission begins with a personal consultation and results in a work of enduring artistic merit.
Portrait Artist Nebraska Area
As your trusted Portrait Artist Nebraska, Hazel Morgan serves portrait clients in Nebraska and the surrounding communities. Portraits are shipped directly to your door with professional packaging and full insurance coverage.
Portrait Services in Nebraska Communities
How to Commission a Portrait from Nebraska
Commissioning a portrait from Hazel Morgan is a collaborative and enjoyable experience, regardless of where you are located in Nebraska. 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 Nebraska, 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 Nebraska typically receive their portrait within one to two weeks of completion.
Why Clients in Nebraska 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 Nebraska
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 Nebraska 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 Nebraska. 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 Nebraska
Hazel admires Nebraska for the kind of quiet, unhurried honesty that she finds increasingly rare in the world. There's something about the wide-open landscape - the endless sky pressing down on golden fields - that strips away pretension and leaves only what's real. That authenticity speaks directly to her work as a portrait painter, because the best portraits aren't about flattery; they're about truth. When she visits the state and walks through the tree-lined streets of the Dundee neighbourhood in Omaha, she notices how people carry themselves with an ease and a groundedness that she longs to translate onto canvas. Faces here seem to have stories they're genuinely willing to share.
Hazel loves the cultural richness that Nebraska holds without ever making a fuss about it. She has spent meaningful afternoons at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, wandering through its galleries and feeling that particular creative charge that only great art can deliver. Seeing how the museum honours both classic and contemporary works reminds her why portraiture matters - it's a way of saying that a person's face, their light, their particular way of looking at the world, is worth preserving. She also deeply appreciates the legacy of figures like Willa Cather, the beloved Nebraska author whose writing captured the inner lives of ordinary people with extraordinary tenderness. That same impulse - to look closely, to care deeply - drives every portrait Hazel paints.
Hazel also admires the way Nebraska's communities come together around shared pride and genuine warmth. She has found that clients here tend to approach the portrait process with openness rather than anxiety, trusting her to see them clearly and honestly. That trust is something she never takes lightly, and it consistently brings out her most heartfelt work. The rolling Sandhills region, stretching across the central part of the state, has also left a lasting impression on her imagination - its vast, serene beauty feels like a living reminder that stillness and depth go hand in hand.
Hazel also loves the straightforward kindness she encounters at every turn in Nebraska. People here ask real questions, offer real welcomes, and sit for their portraits with a kind of calm dignity that makes her job feel less like work and more like a genuine conversation between two people - one with a brush, one without.
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 Nebraska.
Request a Free ConsultationNebraska Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In
Adams, Antelope, Arthur, Banner, Blaine, Boone, Box Butte, Boyd, Brown, Buffalo, Burt, Butler, Cass, Cedar, Chase, Cherry, Cheyenne, Clay, Colfax, Cuming, Custer, Dakota, Dawes, Dawson, Deuel, Dixon, Dodge, Douglas, Dundy, Fillmore, Franklin, Frontier, Furnas, Gage, Garden, Garfield, Gosper, Grant, Greeley, Hall, Hamilton, Harlan, Hayes, Hitchcock, Holt, Hooker, Howard, Jefferson, Johnson, Kearney, Keith, Keya Paha, Kimball, Knox, Lancaster, Lincoln, Logan, Loup, Madison, McPherson, Merrick, Morrill, Nance, Nemaha, Nuckolls, Otoe, Pawnee, Perkins, Phelps, Pierce, Platte, Polk, Red Willow, Richardson, Rock, Saline, Sarpy, Saunders, Scotts Bluff, Seward, Sheridan, Sherman, Sioux, Stanton, Thayer, Thomas, Thurston, Valley, Washington, Wayne, Webster, Wheeler and York.
Towns in Nebraska Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
Omaha, Dundee, Country Club District, Field Club, Happy Hollow, Regency, Elkhorn, Bennington, Gretna, Papillion, La Vista, Bellevue, Ralston, Waterloo, Valley, Fremont, Blair, Lincoln, Country Club Lincoln, Near South, Piedmont, Waverly, Hickman, Seward, Crete, Beatrice, Nebraska City, Plattsmouth, Ashland, Columbus, Norfolk, Wayne, South Sioux City, Grand Island, Kearney, Hastings, Aurora, York, Holdrege, North Platte, Ogallala, McCook, Broken Bow, Valentine, Thedford, Mullen, Alliance, Chadron, Scottsbluff, Gering and Sidney.
Karl Bodmer, Solomon Butcher and the Nebraska Portrait
Two of the most important bodies of portraiture ever made in America were made in Nebraska, and neither was made by a Nebraskan. One is a set of watercolours painted by a young Swiss artist travelling up the Missouri in 1833. The other is three thousand glass plates exposed by a failing homesteader who gave up farming to photograph his neighbours.
The land is Omaha, Ponca, Pawnee, Otoe-Missouria and Lakota homeland. The Platte River route carried the Oregon, California and Mormon trails, and Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff were the landmarks by which emigrants measured their progress. The Homestead Act of 1862 opened it to settlement, and the first claim filed anywhere in the United States was near Beatrice.
Karl Bodmer came up the river in 1832 as draughtsman to Prince Maximilian of Wied, a German naturalist making a scientific expedition into the interior. Over two years Bodmer painted the Mandan, Hidatsa, Omaha and Blackfeet peoples with astonishing precision and, more importantly, with respect - named individuals, sitting formally, in their own clothes. Within five years smallpox had killed most of the Mandan. The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha holds the Maximilian-Bodmer Collection, and it is one of the great treasures of American art.
Solomon Butcher is the other. He homesteaded in Custer County in 1880, discovered he was a bad farmer, and spent the next fifteen years driving a wagon around the sandhills photographing families in front of their sod houses. He posed them with everything they owned - the organ dragged outside, the horses, the cow, the children in their best clothes. Around three thousand negatives survive at the Nebraska State Historical Society. As a portrait of a people at a particular moment, it has no equal.
The Joslyn came from Sarah Joslyn, who built it in 1931 in memory of her husband, a newspaper distributor. It is a pink Georgia marble art deco building, one of the best of its kind in America, extended by Norman Foster in 1994. The Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln occupies a Philip Johnson building of 1963 and holds a distinguished collection of American art.
Willa Cather is Nebraska’s greatest portraitist in words. She grew up at Red Cloud in Webster County among Bohemian, Swedish and Norwegian immigrant families, and My Ántonia and O Pioneers! are essentially portraits - of Ántonia Shimerda, of Alexandra Bergson, of people whose faces she remembered from childhood. Six of her books are set in the state and the Cather buildings at Red Cloud are preserved.
The Sandhills are the physical fact here. Nineteen thousand square miles of grass-stabilised dunes over the Ogallala Aquifer, too fragile to plough, so they were never broken - the largest such formation in the Western Hemisphere and one of the least altered landscapes in America. Cattle ranches there run to tens of thousands of acres and stay in families for a very long time.
Omaha built its wealth on the Union Pacific, on stockyards that were briefly the largest in the world, and on insurance and food processing. Later Berkshire Hathaway made it a financial centre out of all proportion to its size, and Kiewit, Mutual of Omaha and ConAgra added to it. The Gold Coast, Dundee and Happy Hollow neighbourhoods hold the houses that money built.
Commissions come from Omaha and its western suburbs, from Lincoln, and from the ranching and farming counties. Omaha: Dundee, Happy Hollow, the Country Club district, Regency, Elkhorn. Lincoln: the Country Club area, Near South, Piedmont. Grand Island, Kearney and Hastings in the Platte valley. And the Sandhills ranches around Valentine, Thedford, Mullen and Broken Bow.
Institutional portraiture is well established: the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney, Creighton, Doane, Hastings College, Nebraska Wesleyan, the Nebraska Medical Center, Boys Town, the state capitol at Lincoln - a four-hundred-foot tower by Bertram Goodhue, one of the most original public buildings in the United States - the federal courts and the older Omaha firms.
The typical Nebraska commission is a farm or ranch succession, often timed to a centennial. The state has recognised farms and ranches held by one family for a hundred years since 1956, and there are several thousand of them. A portrait made for that occasion usually wants the ground in it.
Butcher understood the impulse exactly. His subjects hauled their furniture out into the yard so that the picture would show what they had built. It is the same instinct that makes a family commission a painting today, and it has not weakened.