Getting Your Portrait Painted Is Trendy Again
from Bloomberg Business
Where does one find these portraitists? Often, people get the idea after seeing a picture in the home of a friend.
Joanna Coles, the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, commissioned paintings for both of her teenage sons after meeting the portraitist Hilary Cooper near her vacation home in rural Connecticut. And even though painted portraits are “something people really value,” she says, “it’s just, how on earth do you get one?”
On a Saturday afternoon in late summer, Coles is sitting for her own portrait in Cooper’s attic studio in a rambling, 1850s hilltop house in Lakeville, Conn., which Cooper shares with her husband, the lawyer-turned-author Chris Crowley. The walls of the studio, which overlooks a lake and the surrounding woods, are covered with Cooper’s portraits of friends and acquaintances: a large oil painting of a 19-year-old heir to the Mellon fortune hangs on one wall; nearby, a watercolor of Patty Hearst is propped up in a corner; a bronze bust of the late novelist James Salter stands on a table in the studio.