Ellen Cooper is a contemporary American portrait artist whose refined painting style and approach to her subjects has garnered her numerous awards and prominent mention in several publications.

She studied at Tyler School of Art at Temple University, and pursued additional study under contemporary portrait masters Burton Silverman and Daniel Greene.

Cooper’s website portfolio is divided into Portraits and Paintings. In the former section, you’ll find a range of approaches, from formal and corporate to informal compositions in which her subjects are portrayed in settings that add to the revelation of their personalities. I find that kind of portrait particularly appealing, and more of an opportunity to meet a portrait painter as a painter.

When viewing the images on her site, note the magnifying glass icon under the images that is linked to larger versions, even thought the initial images themselves are not.

Even more revealing of Cooper’s abilities and sensibilities as painter are the gallery pieces in the Paintings section. In these, she is still exploring portrait and figurative subjects, but freed from the restraints of commissioned portraiture. Here you can see her deft control of value relationships and muted color.

Cooper seems particularly adept at portraying the subtle expressions that convey personality in her portraits of children, adolescents and women, who are frequently depicted in less formal poses and environments than their male counterparts.

You can find additional examples of her gallery paintings, along with drawings, on the Haynes Galleries website.

Thomas Sully was an American painter born in England. His family moved the the U.S. in 1792, when he was 9. He studied briefly with Gilbert Stuart, and traveled to London for nine months to study with American expatriate painter Benjamin West.

Sully spent most of his career in Philadelphia. He painted such notable figures as John Quincy Adams, the Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson and James Polk. in 1837, he traveled to England again and painted several studies and a full-length portrait of Queen Victoria (above, second from bottom).

His portraits often seem to me to be warmer in tone and have a more personal and intimate feeling than those of his contemporaries.

Sully was prolific, creating over two thousand paintings and drawings in his career. One of his lifelong passions was literature and the theatre. The Milwaukee Art Museum has mounted an exhibition titled Thomas Sully: Painted Performance, that centers on that theme. The exhibition runs from October 11, 2013 to January 5, 2014.

The museum’s website includes a preview of works from the show (images above, top six).