The New Status Symbol? A Painted Portrait
The New Status Symbol? A Painted Portrait
Julie L. BelcoveMon, April 27, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC
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The New Status Symbol? A Painted PortraitFrances Bell
The strikingly attractive woman in the painting gazes steadily at the viewer, her hair swept over one shoulder, her expression unsmiling but serene. She wears a high-necked, lacy white top—her wedding blouse—and a long velvet skirt in a rich shade of crimson that puddles on the floor and the antique settee where she sits, legs crossed, commanding the space. There’s a timelessness about the image, which has clear classical cues but feels deeply modern, one that, arguably, can be achieved only with the pliant blend of pigment and oil that centuries of portrait artists have favored.
Like countless predecessors across Europe and the U.S., the canvas, completed just over a year ago, has taken its place in a grand home of an old family, this one in the English countryside. But its subject does not bear much resemblance to generations past. She is Rose Hulse, an American-born tech entrepreneur who married into an aristocratic clan. Hulse is also Black, and Frances Bell, one of the U.K.’s leading portraitists, depicts her holding a colorful Maasai necklace, a nod to her African ancestry.
“I never really saw people like me in the museums,” Hulse says on a video call, “and if I did see it, it was really from a negative or derogatory standpoint. I felt that for my children, if they can’t go see people like me in the museum, they can at least see one at home. And so, I decided to have a portrait done.”
Hulse is just one client contributing to a surging demand for portrait commissions on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in China, India, and the Middle East. Many are turning to specialists like Bell, who trained in Florence and carries on the tradition of painting from life (the first of Hulse’s multiple sittings lasted eight hours), or Claudia Munro Kerr, who’s been cornering the market on charcoal drawings of New York private school children and oil paintings of their mothers. Other clients are after edgier fare from contemporary artists who take commissions as a side hustle—or, conferring even higher “if you know, you know” status, only for favored connections.
A piece by artist Adam Dressner.Adam Dressner
But the underlying motivations are surprisingly similar: In an age of photographic ubiquity, when nearly all of us walk around with a highly advanced camera in our pockets and increasingly rely on AI to fudge our shortcomings, an oil painting or a bronze sculpture stands out for its permanence. Anyone can take a selfie—by some estimates, 93 million are shot every day—but not everyone can afford the luxury of paying an artist tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to stare at them for hours and produce a likeness by hand. As one artist says, it’s a “low-key flex.”
“Portraiture is one of the foundational figurative art forms, and we have examples all the way back to antiquity,” says Bell. “What’s so beguiling about it is it’s like [the artist has] cracked a portal, and you can step out of time and your culture and go through into another world. It’s so viscerally personable—you empathize with these people.”
Over the past 29 years, Sara Stewart, the founder of Fine Art Commissions in the U.K., has built a roster of in-demand portraitists and watched as the clientele has expanded from what she describes as “the old guard who wanted their portraits painted because their great-grandfathers did” to “the super-rich collector crowd” to people celebrating milestone birthdays or anniversaries. “It became this luxury item that was also something you could discuss and look at,” she says, adding that museum portrait exhibitions, including two recent John Singer Sargent shows in the U.K. and the reopening of the Old Master-laden Frick Collection in New York, have further fueled business. No doubt Sotheby’s recent record-breaking sale of Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” for over $236 million will entice more clients to preserve their visage for posterity.
Munro Kerr at work.Claudia Munro Kerr
Among Stewart’s stable of artists are Jamie Coreth and Nicky Philipps, the latter of whom is virtually a modern-day court painter, having completed commissioned works of Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Anne, Catherine, Princess of Wales, and William and Harry in the brothers’ first official oil portrait, painted when they were in their 20s and still on speaking terms. They appear in military dress uniform, their posture casual, looking at one another with subtle smiles, as if sharing an inside joke. “They were lovely,” recalls Philipps, who hails from a family of artists. “They were so chatty, and they finished each other's sentences and joshed around. They got on so well.”
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Not wanting to intrude on their intimacy, Philipps acted more like a fly on the wall. Typically, though, she and her peers chat up their subjects in order to glean insight into their character. Coreth recalls a 2021 commission to paint Charles Innes-Ker, 11th Duke of Roxburghe, in his uniform for the ceremonial Royal Company of Archers, in a manner akin to depictions of his ancestors. But while a guest at the duke’s Scottish estate, Coreth was taken with how the aristocrat “melted” in the presence of his young daughter. The artist subsequently convinced him to scrap the formal approach entirely. The result is a seven-foot-tall canvas of the proud papa wearing jeans and holding the toddler, her arm slung around his neck.
Innes-Ker’s relaxed vibe is emblematic of a modern aesthetic Coreth refers to as “less hand-on-a-globe.” When Munro Kerr painted her friend Uma Thurman, the actress wore a classic white button-front shirt exposing a hint of her black bra, her hair in a messy bun. The shirt, Thurman explains in an email, was a costume for her 2017 Broadway debut in The Parisian Woman. “This was a seminal, challenging, and unique moment in my career,” she writes. “The idea came to us that a portrait painted on the stage of the play in the shirt would be an interesting experiment between Claudia’s artistry and this unique artistic moment in my acting life. The theater (which found this very unconventional and probably against Broadway union rules) allowed us to steal a single hour with the stage lights on to do this fun creative exercise between us.”
Frances Bell’s art.Frances Bell
Many portraitists prefer sitters to come to their studios, in part to ensure northern light, which is more consistent than other exposures. Some paint pretty much the entire composition from life. Philipps tries to book the sessions on consecutive days to keep the oil wet. She also declines to paint anyone under the age of 16—no matter how much a mom cajoles. Coreth sometimes required 30 or 40 sittings early in his career, before concluding that few clients had that kind of time or patience. Now, he also creates a range of references, including photos, videos, sketches, and color studies.
Among the art-collector set, posing for a noted contemporary artist carries additional weight, particularly because so many big names—from 98-year-old Alex Katz on down to 36-year-old Jordan Casteel—don’t accept private gigs (or admit they do). Art adviser and serial commissioner BJ Topol has been painted by Francesco Clemente, known for his sensual depictions of beautiful women, as well as by Prudence Whittlesey, whose canvases veer sharply into abstraction. Topol has also bought portraits of her young daughters by Will Cotton, who topped Isabel’s head with meringue and Alexandra’s with meringue and a cupcake, and conceptual artist Vik Muniz, who rendered Alexandra’s face in chocolate sauce, then photographed the ephemeral image.
One contemporary artist who regularly takes paying clients is Ahn Duong. The well-connected Duong has painted powerbrokers and socialites. She even sculpted a figurehead of Diane von Furstenberg for billionaire husband Barry Diller’s yacht. Duong acknowledges that for those who have more luxury bags and clothes than they can wear, being immortalized in paint or bronze still thrills.
A portrait of a child by Claudia Munro Kerr.Claudia Munro Kerr
In Duong’s view, what separates her from full-time portraitists is her unwillingness to flatter her subjects even a little. “To like this kind of portrait, you have to love the work of the artist,” she says. “It’s an act of surrender, because you want to have that connection, that experience.” Though she holds the power in the relationship, Duong adds, the connection is equally profound for her. “You have to love your subject, because you’re paying so much attention to it.”
Painter Adam Dressner loves painting people so much that he often scouts for unusual subjects in Greenwich Village, setting up his custom art cart and charging sitters whatever they want to pay. “It’s everyday types of people who get treated as if they were kings and queens,” says Dressner, a lawyer-turned-artist.
For his recent debut gallery show, at 1969 Gallery, Dressner spun the practice into a kind of performance art, painting people who came by during the seven-week run. But he rarely accepts commissions in the traditional sense of the word. “I personally am interested in quirky, eccentric New Yorkers. For the most part, those people aren’t in a position to commission a very expensive oil painting of themselves. But I do think they make the best paintings.”
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