Commissioning a Portrait in New Jersey
Hazel Morgan provides a bespoke portrait painting service to clients throughout New Jersey. 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 Jersey. Each commission begins with a personal consultation and results in a work of enduring artistic merit.
Portrait Artist New Jersey Area
As your trusted Portrait Artist New Jersey, Hazel Morgan serves portrait clients in New Jersey and the surrounding communities. Portraits are shipped directly to your door with professional packaging and full insurance coverage.
Portrait Services in New Jersey Communities
How to Commission a Portrait from New Jersey
Commissioning a portrait from Hazel Morgan is a collaborative and enjoyable experience, regardless of where you are located in New Jersey. 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 Jersey, 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 Jersey typically receive their portrait within one to two weeks of completion.
Why Clients in New Jersey 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 Jersey
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 Jersey 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 Jersey. 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 Jersey
Hazel admires New Jersey for its remarkable ability to contain multitudes - quiet suburban streets that give way to dramatic coastlines, gritty urban energy sitting comfortably alongside leafy historic towns. She finds that this layered quality mirrors something she has always believed about portrait painting: that the most interesting subjects are never just one thing. New Jersey people, in her experience, tend to carry that same richness. They are unpretentious and direct, yet often surprisingly thoughtful and soulful when you spend a little time with them. It is exactly the kind of character that translates beautifully onto canvas.
Hazel loves the way her New Jersey clients tend to arrive with real stories. Many of them come to her having already lived boldly - raised families across two cultures, built businesses from scratch, or spent decades rooted in neighbourhoods with genuine history. She has painted clients who grew up near the Asbury Park boardwalk, and she finds that those communities produce people with a particular warmth and resilience that she genuinely enjoys capturing. That coastal light - softer and more diffuse than people expect - also works its way into how she thinks about tone and atmosphere in her portraits of clients from that part of the state.
Hazel also admires the cultural depth that New Jersey quietly holds. She has spent time around Princeton and feels a genuine affection for the way the town balances its intellectual heritage with everyday life. The mix of long-established families and newly arrived communities gives the whole region a creative tension she finds inspiring. New Jersey has also given the world figures like William Carlos Williams, whose insistence on finding poetry in ordinary, local things resonates deeply with Hazel's own approach to portraiture - her goal has always been to find what is genuinely extraordinary in the person sitting in front of her.
Hazel also loves the loyalty she has found among her New Jersey clients over the years. Word travels warmly between families and friends, and she has been trusted with commissions that span generations - grandparents, then parents, then children. That continuity means a great deal to her. It tells her that the work she is making feels meaningful to real people in real communities, and for a portrait painter, there is simply no better measure of whether you are doing something worthwhile.
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 Jersey.
Request a Free ConsultationNew Jersey Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In
Atlantic, Bergen, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Essex, Gloucester, Hudson, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Salem, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren.
Towns in New Jersey Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
Alpine, Saddle River, Upper Saddle River, Franklin Lakes, Ridgewood, Ho-Ho-Kus, Tenafly, Englewood Cliffs, Demarest, Cresskill, Montclair, Glen Ridge, Short Hills, Millburn, Summit, Chatham, Madison, Florham Park, Harding, New Vernon, Mendham, Bernardsville, Far Hills, Peapack-Gladstone, Basking Ridge, Bedminster, Tewksbury, Oldwick, Califon, Hopewell, Princeton, Pennington, Lawrenceville, Rumson, Fair Haven, Little Silver, Colts Neck, Holmdel, Middletown, Sea Bright, Mantoloking, Bay Head, Spring Lake, Sea Girt, Deal, Allenhurst, Avalon, Stone Harbor, Cape May, Moorestown, Haddonfield and Medford.
Between Two Art Markets: Portraiture in New Jersey
New Jersey has spent most of its history within sight of two larger art markets, and its own artistic identity has been shaped as much by that proximity as by anything else. Painters who worked here were rarely more than a train ride from New York or Philadelphia, and the state’s collectors could buy in either city. What New Jersey developed instead was something quieter and more domestic: a strong tradition of landscape painting, a series of early and unusually serious museums, and a long habit of commissioning portraits for the house rather than the gallery.
Before European settlement the region was the homeland of the Lenape, whose visual traditions were expressed through wampum, carved wood, quillwork and painted hide. Dutch and Swedish settlement began in the seventeenth century, and English control followed, leaving a colony of small farms, river ports and iron forges rather than large plantations.
Colonial portraiture in New Jersey followed the pattern of the middle colonies. Itinerant limners travelled between Philadelphia, Trenton, Burlington and New York, painting merchants, landowners and Quaker families in a plain style that suited the sitters. The results are less grand than Virginia’s colonial portraits and considerably more direct.
The Revolution ran directly through the state, and New Jersey produced one of the defining images of it. Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of Washington at the Battle of Princeton, painted in 1784 for the state and hung in Nassau Hall at what is now Princeton University, is both a portrait and a history painting, and it established a template for how American military leadership would be depicted for a century.
The nineteenth century brought New Jersey its most significant painter. George Inness settled in Montclair in 1885 and spent his last years there, producing the atmospheric late landscapes that changed American painting’s relationship with light and weather. Inness attracted others, and Montclair and the Oranges developed into a genuine artists’ colony within commuting distance of Manhattan.
New Jersey’s museums arrived early and with unusual ambition. The Newark Museum opened in 1909 under John Cotton Dana, whose insistence that a museum should serve a working industrial city rather than a wealthy elite made it one of the most progressive institutions in the country. The Montclair Art Museum followed in 1914, founded specifically to collect American art at a time when most museums still treated it as secondary.
Industrial wealth built the market. Silk in Paterson, ceramics in Trenton, shipping in Camden and the enormous suburban fortunes of Essex, Morris and Bergen counties produced families who built substantial houses and furnished them properly. Portraiture in New Jersey has always been strongest in exactly these places, and for the same reason: large rooms, long occupancy, and families who expected to stay.
The state also produced artists who worked far outside the portrait tradition. Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken and became one of the defining documentary photographers of the twentieth century, and her work is a reminder that the most important New Jersey images of ordinary people were made with a camera rather than a brush.
Princeton gave the state an institutional anchor of a different kind. The university’s art museum built a serious encyclopaedic collection, and the town’s combination of academic, scientific and financial families created a steady demand for formal portraiture that has continued without interruption for two centuries.
Today New Jersey holds one of the highest concentrations of household wealth in the United States, and it is unusually spread out. The Somerset Hills around Far Hills, Bernardsville and Peapack-Gladstone support an equestrian tradition with a corresponding appetite for horse and family portraits. Bergen County, Short Hills and Summit hold professional and financial families. The shore communities from Rumson to Spring Lake and down to Avalon hold houses that have passed through several generations.
Contemporary New Jersey portraiture is overwhelmingly domestic in scale and intention. There is institutional work — universities, hospitals, firms — but the characteristic commission here is a family painting for a hall or a dining room, made because a house is expected to hold the same family for a long time. In a state defined by movement, roads and proximity to somewhere else, that impulse to fix something permanently in one room is worth noticing.