Portrait Commissions Across Michigan
From Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills to Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids and the northern lake shore, Michigan families and organisations commission their oil portraits from Hazel Morgan. She has worked professionally for over four decades and paints each portrait with her own hand, from the first sketch to the final varnish.
Michigan commissions have a pattern of their own. Many families here keep two houses — a year-round home and a cottage on a lake — and a portrait may be painted for either. Family businesses that have passed through three or four generations often mark the moment of handover. And the state’s universities and hospitals keep portrait collections that are still being added to.
Serving Southeast Michigan, the West Side and Up North
Because most portraits are painted from photographs and shipped, the location of the studio makes no difference to a Michigan commission. A painting for a Detroit-area house, a Grand Rapids office or a cottage near Petoskey arrives the same way: professionally crated and fully insured.
Portrait Services in Michigan Communities
What Happens After You Get in Touch
Start with the photographs you have
Photographs are the starting point for most of Hazel’s portraits, so the first useful thing is simply to gather what you have. For a cottage portrait, summer photographs taken outdoors in the long northern evening light are ideal. Hazel will guide you on what works and can combine several images into one painting, and if a sitting in person is practical, that can be arranged too.
A free consultation
Hazel then talks it through with you — over the phone, by video call or by email, at no cost and with no obligation — covering the composition, size, clothing, background and where the painting will hang.
Six to twelve weeks at the easel
Most portraits take six to twelve weeks to paint, depending on complexity, and you receive progress photographs at key stages so that you can comment before the portrait is finished.
Crated, insured and delivered
Michigan clients usually receive the finished portrait within one to two weeks of completion. Shipping and framing are costed when the painting is done, and Hazel can recommend specialist fine-art framers.
What Michigan Clients Value in a Hazel Morgan Portrait
Michigan knows good painting — the Detroit Institute of Arts, Cranbrook and the museums in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo have seen to that — and a portrait commissioned here is usually judged against real paintings rather than photographs. Hazel offers:
- Over forty years of professional portrait painting and hundreds of completed commissions.
- Exhibition at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters.
- A direct relationship with the artist: Hazel paints every portrait herself.
- Regular progress images, and adjustments until the portrait is right.
Michigan Commissions: Common Questions
Yes. Combining several photographs into a single portrait is something Hazel does regularly, so family members photographed on different days — or in different summers — can appear together, with the water behind them.
Allow six to twelve weeks for painting and up to two weeks for delivery. If you want it hanging for the start of the season, a winter or early-spring conversation is ideal.
Yes. Alongside private commissions, Hazel paints corporate, academic and institutional portraits, including portraits that mark a retirement or a change of leadership.
No. The majority of Hazel’s portraits are painted from photographs, although a live sitting can be set up when it is practical.
More questions are answered in the full FAQ.
Why Hazel Loves Michigan
Hazel admires Michigan for its quietly extraordinary spirit - a state that carries both rugged natural beauty and a deep, unpretentious sense of community. From the sweeping shorelines of the Great Lakes to the creative energy humming through its cities, Michigan has a character that feels genuinely earned rather than performed. Hazel has visited and worked with clients across the state over the years, and each time she returns, she finds herself absorbing something new - a particular quality of light filtering through birch trees, or the way a neighbourhood feels lived-in and loved at the same time. That authenticity feeds directly into her portrait work, reminding her that the most compelling subjects are those who carry a real story in their faces.
Hazel loves the warmth she consistently encounters from Michigan clients, who tend to approach a commissioned portrait with openness and genuine curiosity rather than self-consciousness. There is something about the Midwestern character - honest, grounded, quietly proud - that makes for deeply rewarding sittings. She has worked with families in Detroit's Corktown neighbourhood, one of the city's oldest and most characterful areas, and she always finds that the people there bring the same layered, resilient energy to a portrait session that the neighbourhood itself radiates. Those connections remind her of why she became a painter in the first place - not simply to render a likeness, but to honour a person's presence.
Hazel also admires Michigan's rich cultural landscape, which offers no shortage of inspiration between commissions. The Detroit Institute of Arts holds a collection that Hazel regards with enormous respect, and she has spent reflective hours there studying how the great portrait masters used light and shadow to draw out interior life. Standing in front of those works sharpens her eye and stokes her enthusiasm every single time.
Hazel also loves that Michigan feels like a place still in conversation with its own identity - always evolving, never quite finished, and richer for it. The legacy of Motown, the resilience of Detroit's creative revival, the quieter pleasures of the Upper Peninsula - all of it speaks to a state full of people worth painting. For Hazel, that is reason enough to keep returning.
Start Your Michigan Portrait
Arrange a complimentary, no-obligation consultation, and Hazel will prepare a personalised quotation for your commission.
Request a Free ConsultationMichigan Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In
Alcona, Alger, Allegan, Alpena, Antrim, Arenac, Baraga, Barry, Bay, Benzie, Berrien, Branch, Calhoun, Cass, Charlevoix, Cheboygan, Chippewa, Clare, Clinton, Crawford, Delta, Dickinson, Eaton, Emmet, Genesee, Gladwin, Gogebic, Grand Traverse, Gratiot, Hillsdale, Houghton, Huron, Ingham, Ionia, Iosco, Iron, Isabella, Jackson, Kalamazoo, Kalkaska, Kent, Keweenaw, Lake, Lapeer, Leelanau, Lenawee, Livingston, Luce, Mackinac, Macomb, Manistee, Marquette, Mason, Mecosta, Menominee, Midland, Missaukee, Monroe, Montcalm, Montmorency, Muskegon, Newaygo, Oakland, Oceana, Ogemaw, Ontonagon, Osceola, Oscoda, Otsego, Ottawa, Presque Isle, Roscommon, Saginaw, Sanilac, Schoolcraft, Shiawassee, St. Clair, St. Joseph, Tuscola, Van Buren, Washtenaw, Wayne and Wexford.
Towns in Michigan Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
Detroit, Indian Village, Palmer Woods, Boston-Edison, Grosse Pointe, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Shores, Grosse Pointe Park, Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Franklin, Bingham Farms, Beverly Hills, Rochester, Rochester Hills, Troy, Northville, Plymouth, Novi, Ann Arbor, Barton Hills, Dexter, Chelsea, Saline, Lansing, East Lansing, Okemos, Grand Rapids, East Grand Rapids, Ada, Cascade, Holland, Saugatuck, Douglas, Grand Haven, Spring Lake, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Midland, Saginaw, Bay City, Traverse City, Old Mission Peninsula, Leland, Glen Arbor, Charlevoix, Petoskey, Bay View, Harbor Springs, Walloon Lake, Mackinac Island, Marquette and Harbor Country.
Detroit, Cranbrook and Portraiture in Michigan
Michigan is the state where an industrial fortune bought a museum a Rivera, and where a newspaper family built an art school in a garden. It has one of the most interesting patronage histories in America, and it is not the one people expect.
The land is Anishinaabe homeland — Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi, the Council of Three Fires. The French came for furs, founding Sault Ste. Marie in 1668 and Detroit in 1701; the British took over, then the Americans, and statehood came in 1837. Copper from the Keweenaw, iron from the Marquette range and white pine from the north made the first fortunes, long before anyone built a car.
Michigan produced a portrait painter of international standing early. Gari Melchers, born in Detroit in 1860, trained in Düsseldorf and Paris, won a grand prize at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, and painted Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Mellon and much of the American and Dutch establishment. He is one of the most accomplished American portraitists of his generation and one of the least talked about.
The Detroit Institute of Arts, founded in 1885, became one of the great American museums. In 1922 it bought a Van Gogh self-portrait — the first Van Gogh to enter an American public collection. Then in 1932 Edsel Ford paid for Diego Rivera to paint the Detroit Industry murals in the museum’s central court: twenty-seven panels of men and machinery that Rivera considered his finest work.
That commission says something about how Michigan money behaved. Edsel Ford collected seriously, built a Cotswold-style house at Grosse Pointe Shores designed by Albert Kahn, and paid a Mexican communist to paint his father’s factories. Matilda Dodge Wilson built Meadow Brook Hall at Rochester, one of the largest houses in America, and then gave the land for a university.
Cranbrook is the most remarkable of them. George and Ellen Booth, newspaper owners, commissioned Eliel Saarinen from 1925 to build a campus of schools, an academy of art and a museum at Bloomfield Hills. Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Harry Bertoia and Eero Saarinen all came out of it. Modern American design is largely a Michigan invention.
Elsewhere the state built quieter institutions: the Grand Rapids Art Museum in a furniture-making city, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Flint Institute of Arts, the Muskegon Museum of Art, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art at Ann Arbor.
The northern summer colonies are their own world. Bay View at Petoskey, founded as a Methodist assembly in 1875, and Harbor Springs, Charlevoix, Walloon Lake and Mackinac Island have drawn the same families back every July for four and five generations. Portraits commissioned there are often about the place as much as the person — a cottage, a shoreline, children on a dock.
The commissioning geography is well defined. The Grosse Pointes and Detroit’s Indian Village and Palmer Woods. Oakland County — Bloomfield Hills, Birmingham, Franklin, Rochester. Ann Arbor and Barton Hills. East Grand Rapids, Ada and Cascade. Holland, Saugatuck and the Lake Michigan shore. Midland, where the Dow family built a town around a chemical company and a Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice designed half of it. And the north from Traverse City to Harbor Springs.
Institutional portraiture is substantial. The University of Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State, Kalamazoo College, Hope, Albion, the Henry Ford Health System and the Detroit hospitals, the state capitol at Lansing, the federal courts and the older Detroit and Grand Rapids firms all keep collections.
One Michigan habit is worth noting: family businesses here often run to three and four generations, and a portrait is frequently commissioned at the point of handover rather than at retirement. It marks a succession rather than an ending, which changes the mood of the picture considerably.
And the light is worth mentioning too. Nowhere in the interior of America has quite the northern lake light of Leelanau or Little Traverse Bay in late summer — clear, cool and long into the evening. It is very good light to paint in.