Commissioning a Portrait in Wyoming
Hazel Morgan provides a bespoke portrait painting service to clients throughout Wyoming. 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 Wyoming. Each commission begins with a personal consultation and results in a work of enduring artistic merit.
Portrait Artist Wyoming Area
As your trusted Portrait Artist Wyoming, Hazel Morgan serves portrait clients in Wyoming and the surrounding communities. Portraits are shipped directly to your door with professional packaging and full insurance coverage.
How to Commission a Portrait from Wyoming
Commissioning a portrait from Hazel Morgan is a collaborative and enjoyable experience, regardless of where you are located in Wyoming. 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 Wyoming, 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 Wyoming typically receive their portrait within one to two weeks of completion.
Why Clients in Wyoming 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 Wyoming
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 Wyoming 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 Wyoming. 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 Wyoming
Hazel admires Wyoming for its remarkable honesty - a quality she finds rare and genuinely moving. There is something about the state's wide-open landscapes and unhurried way of life that strips away pretension and leaves people looking exactly as they are. The Teton Range rising against a clear blue sky, the sagebrush rolling endlessly across the high plains - these surroundings shape the people who live among them, and Hazel sees that shaping written clearly in every face she is invited to paint. Her clients here carry a quiet confidence earned through real experience, and that authenticity is precisely what she tries to honour in every portrait she creates.
Hazel loves the warmth and directness she encounters in Wyoming's communities, from the historic streets of Laramie to the ranching families gathered around kitchen tables in Sheridan. People here speak plainly, laugh easily, and seem genuinely comfortable in their own skin - which makes for extraordinary portrait subjects. She has had the privilege of painting clients who have spent generations rooted in the same valleys, and listening to their stories before ever lifting a brush gives her work a depth she treasures deeply. That sense of continuity and belonging finds its way into the finished paintings in ways that are difficult to explain but impossible to miss.
Hazel also admires Wyoming's rich cultural life, which visitors often underestimate. The Heart Mountain Interpretive Center near Cody stands as one example of the state's willingness to engage honestly with its complex history - an attitude Hazel respects enormously and finds reflected in the straightforward, unpretentious character of the people she meets. Wyoming does not dress things up unnecessarily, and neither does she when approaching a portrait. She aims to paint people truthfully and with great care, and she has found that Wyoming clients both understand and appreciate that philosophy instinctively.
Hazel also loves returning to Jackson whenever a commission brings her back to the shadow of the Tetons. The National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson always reminds her why art rooted in a specific place and its living spirit endures so powerfully. Wyoming has given her some of her most cherished professional experiences and, more importantly, some of her most genuine human connections. She looks forward to every opportunity to return and put more of this extraordinary place onto canvas.
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 Wyoming.
Request a Free ConsultationWyoming Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In
Albany, Big Horn, Campbell, Carbon, Converse, Crook, Fremont, Goshen, Hot Springs, Johnson, Laramie, Lincoln, Natrona, Niobrara, Park, Platte, Sheridan, Sublette, Sweetwater, Teton, Uinta, Washakie and Weston. Twenty-three in all, for a state with fewer people than most American cities.
Towns in Wyoming Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
Jackson, Wilson, Teton Village, Moose, Kelly, Alta, Star Valley, Afton, Pinedale, Cora, Bondurant, Dubois, Lander, Riverton, Thermopolis, Cody, Wapiti, Meeteetse, Powell, Lovell, Greybull, Worland, Ten Sleep, Sheridan, Big Horn, Story, Buffalo, Kaycee, Gillette, Sundance, Hulett, Moorcroft, Newcastle, Casper, Mills, Glenrock, Douglas, Wheatland, Torrington, Lusk, Cheyenne, Laramie, Centennial, Saratoga, Encampment, Rawlins, Rock Springs, Green River, Pinedale Mesa, Kemmerer, Cokeville, Evanston and Lyman.
Thomas Moran, Buffalo Bill and the Wyoming Portrait
A watercolourist did more for Wyoming than any politician. Thomas Moran travelled with the Hayden survey to the Yellowstone in 1871, made sketches nobody could quite believe, and the following spring Congress created the first national park on earth. Moran had never been west before. Mount Moran in the Tetons is named for him.
The land is Eastern Shoshone, Northern Arapaho, Crow, Lakota and Cheyenne homeland, and the Wind River Reservation is the only one in the country shared by two nations who were historic enemies. The rock art at Legend Rock and the Medicine Wheel high on the Bighorns are among the most significant Indigenous sites on the northern plains.
Wyoming does a surprising number of things first. It was the first government anywhere in the world to give women the vote and keep it, in 1869. Esther Hobart Morris of South Pass City became the first woman to hold judicial office in the United States in 1870. Nellie Tayloe Ross became the first woman governor of any state in 1925. The state calls itself the Equality State, and unlike most such mottoes it is earned.
It also holds the first national park, the first national forest and the first national monument - Devils Tower, proclaimed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, and a sacred site to more than twenty tribal nations who know it as Bear Lodge.
The cattle boom of the 1880s produced one of the odder institutions in American history. The Cheyenne Club, founded in 1880 by the barons who ran cattle on the open range, had French chefs, a wine cellar of some repute, tennis courts and a membership drawn from Boston, New York, Edinburgh and London. Cheyenne was, briefly, claimed to have the highest per capita income of any city in the world. The winter of 1886 and 1887 killed the herds and most of the fortunes, and the Johnson County War of 1892 finished the era in gunfire.
Buffalo Bill Cody is the figure who turned all of this into image. He founded the town of Cody in 1896 and toured his Wild West show through Europe for thirty years, playing to Queen Victoria and to something like fifty million people. Whatever one thinks of the mythology he manufactured, he employed Lakota performers on relatively fair terms and he made the West a subject the world wanted pictures of.
The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody is the result and it is exceptional - five museums under one roof, including the Whitney Western Art Museum with major holdings of Remington, Russell, Bierstadt, Moran and Catlin, and the Plains Indian Museum, which is among the finest of its kind. It was founded in 1917 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who also sculpted the Buffalo Bill statue outside and later founded the Whitney Museum in New York.
Jackson has become an art town in its own right. The National Museum of Wildlife Art, built into a hillside above the elk refuge in 1994, holds some five thousand works and is the only museum of its kind in America. The town supports several dozen galleries, and the Fall Arts Festival draws collectors nationally. The University of Wyoming Art Museum at Laramie completes the picture.
Wyoming remains the least populated state in the union, with fewer than six hundred thousand people in an area larger than the United Kingdom. Ranching, coal, trona, oil and gas, and tourism make the economy. It has no state income tax, which has drawn a steady arrival of wealthy families to Teton County over the last thirty years - now, by some measures, the highest per capita income county in America.
Commissions come from two very different worlds. Teton County - Jackson, Wilson, Teton Village and the Snake River ranches - where houses are large, architect-designed and full of daylight, and where a good many families divide their year. And the ranching counties: Sheridan and Big Horn, Buffalo and Kaycee, Cody and Meeteetse, Pinedale and the Green River valley, where operations have been in the same families since the 1880s.
Institutional portraiture is steady for the size: the University of Wyoming at Laramie, the community colleges, the tribal college at Ethete, the state capitol at Cheyenne - restored in 2019 and one of the handsomest small capitols in the country - the federal courts, the stock growers’ associations and the older Cheyenne and Casper firms.
The Wyoming commission is almost always outdoors and almost always includes a horse. Ranch families here breed their own, know the bloodlines, and expect a horse to be painted as carefully as a person. Sheridan in particular has a long polo tradition - the Big Horn Polo Club has played since 1893, one of the oldest in America - alongside working stock horses.
The country insists on being in the picture, and the scale of it is the problem to solve. Moran worked it out in 1871: paint the figure properly, let the land go back, and do not try to compete with the Tetons. They will win.