Portrait Artist West Virginia

West Virginia Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Barbour, Berkeley, Boone, Braxton, Brooke, Cabell, Calhoun, Clay, Doddridge, Fayette, Gilmer, Grant, Greenbrier, Hampshire, Hancock, Hardy, Harrison, Jackson, Jefferson, Kanawha, Lewis, Lincoln, Logan, Marion, Marshall, Mason, McDowell, Mercer, Mineral, Mingo, Monongalia, Monroe, Morgan, Nicholas, Ohio, Pendleton, Pleasants, Pocahontas, Preston, Putnam, Raleigh, Randolph, Ritchie, Roane, Summers, Taylor, Tucker, Tyler, Upshur, Wayne, Webster, Wetzel, Wirt, Wood and Wyoming.

Towns in West Virginia Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Charleston, South Hills, Edgewood, Kanawha City, Loudendale, South Charleston, Dunbar, Nitro, Hurricane, Teays Valley, Scott Depot, Huntington, Ritter Park, Barboursville, Milton, Parkersburg, Vienna, Williamstown, Wheeling, Woodsdale, Oglebay, Bethlehem, Weirton, Morgantown, Cheat Lake, Star City, Fairmont, Clarksburg, Bridgeport, Buckhannon, Elkins, Davis, Thomas, Canaan Valley, Snowshoe, Marlinton, Lewisburg, Ronceverte, White Sulphur Springs, Bramwell, Bluefield, Princeton, Beckley, Fayetteville, Oak Hill, Hinton, Summersville, Martinsburg, Shepherdstown, Charles Town, Harpers Ferry and Berkeley Springs.

The Greenbrier, Bramwell and the West Virginia Portrait

West Virginia is the only state that came into being by seceding from a secession. When Virginia left the Union in 1861 the western counties refused to go, formed their own government, and were admitted as a separate state in 1863. That act of stubbornness explains a good deal about the place.

The land is Shawnee, Cherokee and Seneca hunting ground, mountainous enough that it was never plantation country. Scots-Irish and German families came down the valleys from Pennsylvania and Virginia in the eighteenth century, and the small-farm, small-church, fiercely independent culture they built is still legible. George Washington surveyed here as a young man and took the waters at what is now Berkeley Springs.

The mineral wealth arrived in the 1870s with the railways. Coal from the Pocahontas seam in McDowell and Mercer counties was among the finest steam coal in the world, and it built fortunes very fast. It also produced a century of company towns, mine wars and the largest armed uprising in America since the Civil War, at Blair Mountain in 1921, when some ten thousand miners fought for the right to organise.

Bramwell is what the money looked like. A small town in Mercer County of a few hundred people, it is said to have had more millionaires per head than anywhere else in America around 1900 - coal operators who built stone and half-timbered mansions with imported fittings, indoor plumbing before most cities had it, and a bank that shipped payroll by private rail car. Most of the houses survive, and the town is on the National Register.

The Greenbrier at White Sulphur Springs is the state’s grandest institution. People have taken the waters there since 1778; twenty-eight presidents have stayed; and in 1948 Dorothy Draper redecorated it in the vast pink-and-green romantic style that made her the most famous decorator in America. Beneath the west wing, the federal government built a bunker in 1959 to house the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear war, and kept it secret for thirty-three years.

Glass is the craft the state is best at. Blenko at Milton has been blowing glass by hand since 1893 and made the stained glass for Washington National Cathedral, the Air Force Academy chapel and hundreds of churches. Fenton at Williamstown made art glass for over a century. Homer Laughlin at Newell, once the largest pottery in the world, still makes Fiesta ware. All of it is skilled handwork, and it has kept a tradition of craftsmanship alive here that outlasted the mines.

The museums are modest and worth knowing. The Huntington Museum of Art is the largest in the state, with a good American collection and a Walter Gropius-designed wing. The Oglebay Institute at Wheeling holds glass and decorative arts. Tamarack at Beckley, a purpose-built centre opened in 1996, sells juried work by West Virginia makers only, which is an idea more states should have copied.

The landscape is the state’s other asset and it is spectacular. The New River Gorge became a national park in 2020 - the newest in the system - and the river running through it is among the oldest on earth. Blackwater Falls, Seneca Rocks, Dolly Sods and the Monongahela National Forest give the eastern highlands a character closer to Maine than to the South.

Pearl S. Buck was born at Hillsboro in Pocahontas County in 1892 and became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her birthplace is preserved. It is a reminder that the state has exported talent for as long as it has exported coal.

Commissions come from a handful of areas. Charleston’s South Hills and Edgewood. Huntington around Ritter Park. Morgantown and Cheat Lake. Wheeling’s Woodsdale and the Oglebay area. The Eastern Panhandle - Shepherdstown, Charles Town, Martinsburg - which increasingly belongs to the Washington orbit. Lewisburg and White Sulphur Springs in the Greenbrier valley. And Snowshoe and Canaan Valley, where the second homes are.

Institutional portraiture is well established: West Virginia University, Marshall, Shepherd, West Virginia Wesleyan, the Greenbrier Military School tradition, the WVU and Charleston medical centres, the state capitol - Cass Gilbert’s building of 1932, whose gold leaf dome stands five feet higher than the national one - the federal courts and the older Charleston firms.

The characteristic West Virginia commission is a family one, tied to a place. A farm in the Greenbrier valley, a camp on the Elk or the Cranberry, a house in a coal town where four generations were raised. Hunting dogs feature, and so do horses in the eastern counties. What people want, mostly, is a picture that says a family stayed - which, given the state’s history of people leaving, is the most meaningful thing a portrait here can do.