Commissioning a Portrait from the Bluegrass and Beyond
Hazel Morgan paints commissioned oil portraits for clients across Kentucky, from Louisville and Lexington to Northern Kentucky and the western counties. She has painted professionally for more than forty years, and every portrait is painted by her personally - there is no studio of assistants.
Kentucky commissions tend to take a few familiar shapes: a family portrait for a house that has been in the same hands for generations, an institutional portrait for a college, a court or a company, and - this being Kentucky - a portrait that includes a horse. All of them begin the same way, with a conversation.
Where Kentucky Commissions Come From
Most Kentucky portraits are painted from photographs and shipped, so distance from the studio makes no difference to the result. Clients in the Bluegrass, Louisville’s east end, Northern Kentucky and the rest of the state are looked after in exactly the same way, and every finished painting travels in custom crating by insured courier.
Portrait Services in Kentucky Communities
How a Kentucky Commission Works
A conversation first
The first step is a complimentary consultation by telephone, video call or email, with no obligation. Hazel talks through the subject, the composition, the size and the room the painting is meant for - which, in a Kentucky house with tall ceilings, often decides the scale.
The photographs
The majority of Hazel’s commissions are painted from photographs, and she gives clear guidance on what to take or find. For a horse, photographs taken at the animal’s own head height, in soft light, on the farm where it lives are worth more than any number of show-ring shots. Several images can be combined into one painting, and a live sitting can be arranged where practical.
Painting and progress
Once the composition is agreed, painting typically takes six to twelve weeks, depending on complexity. Progress photographs are sent at key stages so that changes can be made while they are still easy.
Delivery to Kentucky
Finished portraits usually reach Kentucky within one to two weeks of completion. Shipping and framing are quoted once the painting is finished, and Hazel can recommend master framers if you would like the frame chosen to suit it.
Why Kentucky Families and Institutions Commission Hazel
Kentucky has a long habit of commissioning portraits properly, from Matthew Jouett’s sitters in the 1820s to the equine painters of the Bluegrass farms, and it knows the difference between a painted portrait and a copied photograph. What Hazel brings to that tradition:
- More than forty years of professional practice and hundreds of commissions for private, corporate and institutional clients.
- Work exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters.
- One painter from start to finish - you deal directly with Hazel, never with an agent or a studio.
- Progress images throughout, and adjustments until you are entirely happy with the finished portrait.
Questions Kentucky Clients Ask
Yes. Equestrian portraits are one of the commission types Hazel paints, and they are almost always painted from photographs, which suits animals that will not stand still for a sitting. Hazel will advise on which shots to take, and a rider and a horse photographed separately can be combined in one painting.
Most portraits take six to twelve weeks from the start of painting, so it is worth getting in touch as early as you can. Rush commissions can sometimes be accommodated for special occasions, and Hazel will give you a realistic date at the consultation.
Often, yes. Hazel regularly works from older and lower-resolution photographs and can combine several into a single portrait. She will tell you honestly at the consultation whether what you have is sufficient.
In custom-built crating by insured courier, directly to your address, usually within one to two weeks of completion. Shipping and framing are quoted separately once the painting is finished.
More answers about sittings, sizes and timings are on the frequently asked questions page.
Why Hazel Loves Kentucky
Hazel admires Kentucky for the depth of character woven into its landscapes and communities. There is something quietly extraordinary about a place where rolling bluegrass meadows sit alongside storied cities, where history feels alive rather than archived. The warmth of the people she has met across the state - from the gentle hospitality of Louisville's neighborhoods to the proud traditions kept alive in smaller towns - reminds her why she fell in love with portraiture in the first place. Faces here carry stories worth telling, and Hazel finds that Kentucky clients bring an openness and authenticity to their sittings that makes her work feel genuinely meaningful rather than simply professional.
Hazel loves the way Kentucky's cultural richness feeds directly into her creative instincts as a painter. A visit to the Frazier History Museum in Louisville once stayed with her for weeks - the layers of human experience preserved there, the faces peering out from old photographs, deepened her thinking about how a portrait can hold a person's entire world within a single frame. She finds that Kentucky clients share this intuitive understanding of legacy and remembrance, which makes the collaborative process of creating a portrait feel deeply connected to something larger than the canvas itself.
Hazel also admires the natural beauty of the state and the way it shapes the people who live within it. The Mammoth Cave National Park region, for instance, carries an almost geological sense of patience and permanence that she sees reflected in the quiet dignity many of her Kentucky subjects bring to their portraits. There is a groundedness here - a sense that people know who they are and where they come from - and that quality translates beautifully onto a painted canvas, lending her portraits a stillness and confidence that she treasures.
Hazel also loves returning to the streets of the Highlands neighborhood in Louisville, where independent spirit and neighborly warmth exist side by side in a way that feels genuinely rare. Conversations there tend to linger, stories get shared over coffee, and she always leaves with a renewed sense of purpose about her work. Kentucky, for Hazel, is not simply a place where she finds clients - it is a place that consistently reminds her why portraits matter and why the human face, honestly observed, is endlessly worth painting.
Talk to Hazel About a Kentucky Portrait
The first conversation is free and carries no obligation. Tell Hazel what you have in mind, and she will come back to you with a personalised quotation.
Request a Free ConsultationKentucky Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In
Adair, Allen, Anderson, Ballard, Barren, Bath, Bell, Boone, Bourbon, Boyd, Boyle, Bracken, Breathitt, Breckinridge, Bullitt, Butler, Caldwell, Calloway, Campbell, Carlisle, Carroll, Carter, Casey, Christian, Clark, Clay, Clinton, Crittenden, Cumberland, Daviess, Edmonson, Elliott, Estill, Fayette, Fleming, Floyd, Franklin, Fulton, Gallatin, Garrard, Grant, Graves, Grayson, Green, Greenup, Hancock, Hardin, Harlan, Harrison, Hart, Henderson, Henry, Hickman, Hopkins, Jackson, Jefferson, Jessamine, Johnson, Kenton, Knott, Knox, Larue, Laurel, Lawrence, Lee, Leslie, Letcher, Lewis, Lincoln, Livingston, Logan, Lyon, Madison, Magoffin, Marion, Marshall, Martin, Mason, McCracken, McCreary, McLean, Meade, Menifee, Mercer, Metcalfe, Monroe, Montgomery, Morgan, Muhlenberg, Nelson, Nicholas, Ohio, Oldham, Owen, Owsley, Pendleton, Perry, Pike, Powell, Pulaski, Robertson, Rockcastle, Rowan, Russell, Scott, Shelby, Simpson, Spencer, Taylor, Todd, Trigg, Trimble, Union, Warren, Washington, Wayne, Webster, Whitley, Wolfe and Woodford.
Towns in Kentucky Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
Lexington, Chevy Chase Lexington, Ashland Park, Versailles, Midway, Georgetown, Paris, Winchester, Nicholasville, Keeneland, Louisville, Cherokee Triangle, Old Louisville, Glenview, Indian Hills, Mockingbird Valley, Anchorage, Prospect, Crestwood, La Grange, Goshen, Harrods Creek, Simpsonville, Shelbyville, Frankfort, Danville, Bardstown, Bowling Green, Owensboro, Paducah, Murray, Somerset, London, Corbin, Berea, Richmond, Mount Sterling, Maysville, Covington, Fort Mitchell, Villa Hills, Edgewood, Union, Florence, Newport, Bellevue, Ashland, Pikeville, Hazard, Hopkinsville and Elizabethtown.
Horses, Heritage and Portrait Painting in Kentucky
Kentucky’s portrait tradition is bound up with two things that outsiders sometimes mistake for decoration and Kentuckians treat as serious business: horses and family. The state produced a genuinely distinguished school of portrait painters in the early nineteenth century, and it sustains one of the strongest traditions of equestrian painting anywhere in the world. Both rest on the same instinct, which is that bloodlines are worth recording.
The land was hunting ground and homeland for Shawnee, Cherokee and Chickasaw peoples, and the great earthwork and mound sites of the Ohio valley lie just beyond its borders. Settlement from Virginia and North Carolina came through the Cumberland Gap from the 1770s, and Kentucky became a state in 1792 - the first west of the Appalachians.
Its first great painter learned from the best. Matthew Harris Jouett, born in Mercer County in 1788, was intended for the law by his father and became a painter instead. In 1816 he travelled to Boston to study under Gilbert Stuart, and returned to Lexington with Stuart’s method intact. Jouett painted several hundred Kentuckians before his death at thirty-nine, and his portraits are the founding documents of the state’s visual record.
Jouett’s example produced others. Oliver Frazer, who studied with Jouett and then in Paris and Italy, and Joseph Henry Bush, another Kentuckian who trained in Philadelphia, kept the standard high through the middle of the century. For a frontier state, Kentucky had an unusually sophisticated portrait market unusually early.
Then there are the horses. Kentucky’s Thoroughbred industry created a demand for animal portraiture as formal and as carefully commissioned as anything painted of a person. Edward Troye, Swiss-born and working in America from the 1830s, became the pre-eminent equine painter of the age and worked extensively in the Bluegrass, recording individual stallions and mares with the precision a stud book requires. That tradition has never lapsed - a great horse in Kentucky is still painted.
Northern Kentucky produced a painter of international standing. Frank Duveneck, born in Covington in 1848, trained in Munich and became one of the most admired American painters of his generation, celebrated for a bravura handling of paint and for portraits of remarkable directness. He later taught in Cincinnati, just across the river, and his influence on American figure painting was considerable.
The state built its institutions around this. The Speed Art Museum opened in Louisville in 1927 and is the oldest and largest art museum in Kentucky, with a collection that runs from antiquity to the present and a particular strength in the painting of the region. The International Museum of the Horse at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington holds equine art of real quality.
Bourbon, tobacco, coal, river commerce and horses built the fortunes that paid for all this. Louisville and Lexington developed distinct patrician societies - the one commercial and riverine, the other agricultural and equestrian - and both took portraiture entirely for granted as part of how a family recorded itself.
That is still where the commissions come from. The Bluegrass around Lexington, Versailles, Midway and Paris, where farms have often been in the same hands for generations. Louisville’s older neighbourhoods - Cherokee Triangle, Glenview, Indian Hills, Anchorage - and the Oldham County horse country north-east of the city. Northern Kentucky across from Cincinnati. Each has its own character, and all of them commission.
Kentucky also sustains a steady institutional practice. The University of Kentucky, the University of Louisville, Transylvania University, Centre College, the state capitol at Frankfort, the courts, the distilleries and the older law firms all maintain portrait collections, and marking a retirement or a foundation with a painting remains ordinary here.
What is distinctive about a Kentucky commission is how often the subject has four legs, and how seriously that is taken. A portrait of a broodmare with her foal, painted properly, will hang in the hall with the family portraits and nobody will think it odd. The same care goes into both.
Underneath it is a settled idea about time. Kentucky families tend to think in generations rather than years, whether they are breeding horses or raising children, and a painted portrait is simply the form that thinking takes on a wall. Jouett understood that in 1820, and it has not changed since.