Crowell Hadden at work.
Photo by Crowell Hadden
Crowell Hadden: An Artist With a Camera and Canvas By Heidi Baumstark Middleburg Life
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APRIL 2016
hrough his exquisite paintings and photographs, Crowell Hadden has mastered the art of capturing beautiful hunt scenes of horses and hounds. His work has graced homes, studios, magazines and newspapers, including the pages of Middleburg Life. “His photos are fabulous. He really is an artist with a camera and a canvas,” said Vicky Moon, Middleburg Life’s editor and author of “The Middleburg Mystique” among her eight books. “I’ve been working with him for 20-plus years. All of his work is magnificent in every way.” His paintings and pen-and-ink sketches can be viewed and purchased at The Four O’clock Fox, a Middleburg antique shop. He also restores old photos and takes photographic portraits of people or pets with studio lighting right in customers’ own homes. How did it all start for Hadden, who now lives in The Plains? He grew up on Long Island in a family of horse lovers and fox hunters. His stepfather, William F. Dobbs, was the master of New York’s Meadowbrook Hunt, originally “Meadow Brook Club,” the oldest, continuously operating polo club in the U.S. first established in 1881. Basically, he grew up riding and loving horses. As a schoolboy in art class, he was always good at painting and drawing. “I always wanted to paint horses, but they looked terrible,” he said. So his stepfather encouraged him to copy paintings of 19th-century artists such as Sir Alfred James Munnings, known as one of England’s finest painters of horses. Other classic artists he tried to duplicate included J.F. Herring, John Ferneley, and Benjamin Marshall. After seeing one of his paintings of a Munnings work, Dobbs urged him to break family tradition of attending Yale,
and enroll in the prestigious Art Students League of New York. Hadden studied commercial art and thought that’s where his focus would lie. The first two years of art school, Hadden drew nude models. “That was in the early ‘60s—I was 18 years old. I’d always heard that was the best way to learn drawing.” And he was right. To get to the Art Students League, he remembers driving to the Glen Head rail station in New York and taking the train to school. On the way home one day while riding the train, “I doodled a horse,” he recalled. “It was perfect. Suddenly, I could draw horses.” In 1967, Hadden moved to Virginia and lived at Llangollen, the Upperville estate then owned by Elizabeth “Liz” Whitney Tippett, a wealthy socialite and philanthropist who owned horses, was an accomplished horse show rider and became a successful owner and breeder of race horses. She was friends with Hadden’s parents and was his godmother. “I lived at a cabin at Llangollen,” he said. “I lived there for 30 years painting scenes of the farm and polo fields.” Tippett also commissioned Hadden to copy all of her original horse paintings. Today, Llangollen includes 1,100 acres, is privately owned, and is under conservation easement. Hadden later did a painting of Dobbs on a horse named Perennial with foxhounds all around him. Perennial came from Llangollen and Mrs. Tippett. Before long, Hadden started getting more commissions to paint other people and scenes. “I started painting a J.F. Herring horse painting called St Giles,” he said. “It took me 900 hours to paint. A man from Sotheby’s came down and appraised it for more than $200,000. I signed it with just my first name, as many artists do.” In the 1970s, Hadden would take photos and paint from the picture, which is how he meandered into serious MIDDLEBURG LIFE