Commissioning a Portrait in New Hampshire
Hazel Morgan provides a bespoke portrait painting service to clients throughout New Hampshire. 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 New Hampshire. Each commission begins with a personal consultation and results in a work of enduring artistic merit.
Portrait Artist New Hampshire Area
As your trusted Portrait Artist New Hampshire, Hazel Morgan serves portrait clients in New Hampshire and the surrounding communities. Portraits are shipped directly to your door with professional packaging and full insurance coverage.
Portrait Services in New Hampshire Communities
How to Commission a Portrait from New Hampshire
Commissioning a portrait from Hazel Morgan is a collaborative and enjoyable experience, regardless of where you are located in New Hampshire. 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 New Hampshire, 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 New Hampshire typically receive their portrait within one to two weeks of completion.
Why Clients in New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire
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 New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire. 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 New Hampshire
Hazel admires New Hampshire for its quietly remarkable character - a state that somehow holds vast, untamed wilderness and tightly knit, storied communities in the same steady hands. The granite peaks of the White Mountains, including the beloved White Mountain National Forest, give the landscape a quality that feels ancient and unhurried, as though time moves at its own considered pace up here. That same quality, Hazel believes, shapes the people who live alongside it. Her portrait subjects from New Hampshire carry something grounded and genuine in their expressions - a kind of quiet dignity earned through seasons of real life - and that makes her work as a painter feel meaningful in a way that is difficult to put into words.
Hazel loves the way New Hampshire's communities hold onto their own stories with such natural pride. Walking through the South End neighbourhood of Portsmouth, with its colourful Federal-style architecture and independent bookshops spilling light onto brick sidewalks, she is reminded that place shapes personality in profound ways. The people she meets here have a warmth that never feels performed - they are curious, direct, and generous with their time. When someone sits for a portrait, that authenticity shows up immediately. Hazel finds that her New Hampshire clients tend to settle into a session with an ease and openness that allows her to reach something true on the canvas fairly quickly, which is genuinely one of the great pleasures of her work.
Hazel also admires the cultural richness that exists quietly alongside New Hampshire's natural beauty. The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester is the kind of institution that surprises visitors with its depth - a world-class collection tucked into a mid-sized city with real community roots. For Hazel, spending time there is both a creative recharge and a reminder of how seriously this state takes artistic tradition. Knowing that her portrait clients in New Hampshire live near and care about places like the Currier deepens her respect for them enormously.
Hazel also loves returning to New Hampshire simply because of how welcome she is made to feel. There is no pretension in how people receive her here, no need for formality or performance on either side of the easel. Poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost spent formative years in this state, and Hazel thinks she understands why - New Hampshire has a way of stripping things back to what is honest and essential, which is precisely the spirit she hopes every portrait she paints will carry.
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 New Hampshire.
Request a Free ConsultationNew Hampshire Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In
Belknap, Carroll, Cheshire, Coös, Grafton, Hillsborough, Merrimack, Rockingham, Strafford and Sullivan.
Towns in New Hampshire Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
Portsmouth, New Castle, Rye, North Hampton, Hampton Falls, Exeter, Stratham, Greenland, Newmarket, Durham, Dover, Newington, Amherst, Bedford, Manchester, Hollis, Hopkinton, Concord, Bow, Dunbarton, Peterborough, Dublin, Hancock, Jaffrey, Harrisville, Keene, Walpole, Hanover, Lyme, Orford, Cornish, Plainfield, New London, Sunapee, Newbury, Bradford, Wolfeboro, Alton Bay, Meredith, Center Harbor, Moultonborough, Holderness, Squam Lake, Laconia, Gilford, Sandwich, Tamworth, North Conway, Jackson, Bretton Woods and Sugar Hill.
Cornish, Saint-Gaudens and the New Hampshire Portrait
For about thirty years around 1900, one small New Hampshire town held more first-rate American artists per square mile than anywhere in the country. The Cornish Colony, spread along the Connecticut River under Mount Ascutney, was where American portraiture went to be taken seriously.
The land is Abenaki and Pennacook homeland. English settlement began at Odiorne’s Point in 1623, making Portsmouth one of the oldest towns in the country, and New Hampshire was the first colony to declare independence from Britain - six months before the Declaration. Timber, shipbuilding, and later the enormous textile mills at Manchester built the wealth. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was at one point the largest cotton mill complex on earth.
Before any of the colonies, New Hampshire had a portrait tradition of a different kind. Itinerant painters worked the river valleys through the early nineteenth century, painting farm families for a few dollars a head in a plain, linear, brilliantly coloured manner. Joseph Steward, the Prior-Hamblin school and dozens of unrecorded hands left several thousand of these likenesses across northern New England, and they are now among the most sought-after American folk paintings.
Then the mountains were discovered. From the 1850s the White Mountain School - Benjamin Champney, Thomas Hill, Albert Bierstadt and others - painted Mount Washington and the Franconia and Crawford notches for a public that had begun to travel. North Conway had painters at work in every field in summer. It was the first American landscape school with a genuinely popular market.
Cornish came out of that. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the greatest American sculptor of his age, took a house there in 1885 and stayed until his death in 1907. He drew Maxfield Parrish, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Kenyon Cox, the painter Lucia Fairchild Fuller, the novelist Winston Churchill and the landscape designer Ellen Shipman. Woodrow Wilson used a Cornish house as his summer White House in 1914 and 1915.
Saint-Gaudens matters particularly to portraiture. His low-relief portrait plaques - of Robert Louis Stevenson, of the Shaw Memorial soldiers, of friends and children - are among the most sensitive likenesses made by any American. The Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park preserves his house, studios and gardens, the only National Park Service site in New Hampshire.
Maxfield Parrish stayed on at Plainfield for sixty years, painting in the luminous glazed technique he invented and which nobody has quite reproduced since. At one point in the 1920s it was estimated that a Parrish print hung in one American household in four.
Elsewhere the state built quietly. The MacDowell Colony at Peterborough, founded in 1907, is the oldest artists’ residency in America and has hosted Thornton Wilder, Aaron Copland, James Baldwin and Alice Walker. The Currier Museum of Art at Manchester holds a genuinely good European and American collection and owns the Zimmerman House, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian designs, open to visitors. Dartmouth’s Hood Museum has the Orozco murals in Baker Library - a major work of Mexican muralism in a New England college.
Commissions come from a well-defined set of places. The Seacoast - Portsmouth, New Castle, Rye and Exeter. The Lakes Region around Wolfeboro, Meredith, Squam and Lake Sunapee, where families have summered for four and five generations. The Monadnock towns of Peterborough, Dublin, Hancock and Harrisville. The Upper Valley at Hanover and Lyme. And the White Mountains at North Conway, Jackson, Sugar Hill and Bretton Woods.
Institutional portraiture is unusually strong for a small state. Dartmouth, the University of New Hampshire, Saint Anselm, Keene State, Colby-Sawyer, and above all the independent schools - Phillips Exeter, St. Paul’s, Kimball Union, Proctor, New Hampton, Brewster - where a retiring head or a long-serving master is very often painted, and where those pictures hang in halls that generations of pupils pass through daily.
The New Hampshire commission tends to be understated. The state motto is famously blunt, the taste runs to plain frames and honest likenesses, and grandeur is not much admired. That suits portrait painting rather well: a picture made without flourish will usually still be convincing in fifty years, which is more than can be said for a flattering one.